Effi Briest and the work on genre

Abstract

AbstractEver since Erich Auerbach’s harsh verdict in Mimesis, the German realist novel has been seen as a peripheral phenomenon in the history of nineteenth‐century literature. Criticized for being too idealizing, insular, or simply irrelevant, it has gone down in literary history as a less modern form of realism, not being able to join the realist traditions of French, British, and Russian literature as a harbinger of modernity. In my paper, I want to challenge this view by rereading Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. I want to show how Fontane’s novel can be read as not just one more and rather belated example of the novel of adultery, but as an intricate reworking of the realist subgenre. Proceeding from Frederic Jameson’s theory of realism, the paper argues that Effi Briest takes up generic elements of its precursors in order to set itself off against them. It stages an internal reconstruction of the genre that through negation opens up a space for writing not yet beset by the tradition. By doing this, Fontane not only finds a new way of attaining the proverbial l’effet du réel, but also places the novel of adultery at the cusp of what is to become Modernism.