Abstract
This article examines three comedies by Cornelius von Ayrenhoff (1733–1819): Der Postzug oder die noblen Passionen (1769), Die große Batterie (1770), and Erziehung macht den Menschen (1785). All three comedies satirize aristocratic characters. The article combines an examination of these comedies within the literary-historical framework of the Austrian adoption and adaptation of J. C. Gottsched’s theater reforms with an analysis of Ayrenhoff’s comedies as literary exemplars of the cultural-historical shift toward the sentimental marriage based on love and free choice of partners, with a pronounced devaluation of socioeconomic factors. The originality of the argument lies in reading Ayrenhoff’s merciless, subversive satire of aristocratic characters as both a reinvigoration and reinterpretation of Gottschedian poetics as well as a means of entertaining cultural-historical anxieties relating both to arranged marriages and to sentimental, love-based marriages.
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