Alexander Sorenson

The Waiting Water (eBook, ePUB)

Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Waiting Water addresses one of the most recurrent and troubling motifs in German Realist literature-death by drowning. Characters find themselves before bodies of water, presented with the familiar realm above the surface and the unobservable, uncanny domain beneath it. With somber regularity, they then disappear into the depths. Alexander Sorenson explores the role that these hidden deaths in water play within a literary movement that set out precisely to reveal universal truths about human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolve around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism-order and sacrifice.

Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs, The Waiting Water shows that the pervasive symbolism of drowning scenes in German Realism, which typically occur in zones of narrative invisibility on the social periphery, reveals the extent to which realist narrative uses the natural environment to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Seitenzahl: 282
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. September 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501777127
• Artikelnr.: 72291341

Autorenporträt

Alexander Sorenson is Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Between the Surface and the Depths
1. Water and Stone: The End of Life and Sacrifice inGoethe's Elective
Affinities and Ebner-Eschenbach'sBeyond Atonement
2. The Wide Sea of Light: Hidden Law and Works ofLove in Stifter's Early
Writing
3. Flumen Publicum: The Imitation of Right and theRecognition of Rite in
Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet
4. A Faint Wake: Atonement and Afterward in Storm'sLate Works
Epilogue: Ophelia and the Boatman