The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism - Brossura

Sorenson, Alexander

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1501777106 ISBN 13: 9781501777103

Casa editrice: Cornell Univ Pr, 2024

Riassunto

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 of human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolves around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism—order and sacrifice.

Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 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 in order to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Alexander Sorenson is Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Cornell Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2024
• ISBN 10: 1501777106
• ISBN 13: 9781501777103
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 264
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile