Philology of Adventure
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Transformations of Adventure in Bourgeois Realism

Medieval German Literature, LMU Munich
Principal Investigator:
Prof. Dr. Susanne Lüdemann
Research Staff:
Georg Huber

 

tp_lüdemann

Adolph von Menzel: „Auf der Fahrt durch schöne Natur" (1892)

The project aims at exploring transformations of the adventure as a narrative and experiential pattern in German bourgeois realism (Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane). It takes its starting point from the observation that, in spite of the manifest rejection of adventure by realist literary programs, and in spite of its elimination from the official self-understanding of bourgeois society, realist literature is subliminally ‘haunted’ by adventure tales and narrative patterns which, in a way, do not cease not to disappear from the bourgeois world. Although in realist fiction the adventurer is often staged as the antitype of the bourgeois (e. g. in Wilhelm Raabe’s narratives), the question of whether (and how) the bourgeois world itself is still capable of adventure, and thus capable of being narrated, plays a prominent role from Freytag to Fontane. By reconstructing the involvement of ‘high’ bourgeois realism with formula fiction and extra-literary (colonial) adventure discourses, the projects draws on its results from the first period of funding while at the same time opening new perspectives on the national literary field (Bourdieu) after 1848 and in the German Empire.

Focus Areas:

Previous Project (1. Funding Period)