Geschichte und Epigonen: '19.jahrhundert' / 'Postmoderne', Stifter / Bernhard by Marcus Hahn

Abstract

574 Reviews attribute and, conversely, as retribution for unfeminine behaviour. This fascinating history of the medical context leads to the articulation of Richards's core concern, namely how writers present the connection between mind and body and, in par ticular, 'iswasting in the novel portrayed as passivity or protest?' (p. 63). Chapter 2 provides further contextualization by considering wasting women in narratives by men. Goethe's Ottilie inDie Wahlverwandtschaften, who 'starves to protect her in tegrity' (p. 78), proves to be the godmother of many that are to follow, while Fontane's Effi Briest, a prime example of the topos, occupies amore ambivalent position be tween sentimentality and critical awareness. The main body of the analysis of women's fiction begins with a discussion of texts that conform to conventional stereotypes and present fragile female figures who rein force the restrictive status quo. Pre-I830 works by Caroline von Wolzogen, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Fanny Tarnow belong in a sentimental tradition that still persists in popular literature at the end of the century. The three chapters that follow pre sent protest rather than passivity, or indeed passivity as protest: 'Alternative Wasting Heroines' starts with Therese Huber's Luise (I796), a rare early example, and then ranges via Ida Hahn-Hahn, Louise Aston, and Fanny Lewald in mid-century to Ebner-Eschenbach and Clara Viebig at the end. Gabriele Reuter has a chapter to herself inwhich Richards argues that the representation of repression, hysteria, and apathy in her work constitutes amore direct attack on socially constructed sexual repression that Freud was to launch later. The final section investigates 'The Eman cipatory Value of Illness, Food Refusal, and Vegetarianism' in the fiction of Hedwig Dohm and Helene Bohlau around I900. This is an important study which weighs up the historical and textual evidence and comes to a range of careful and differentiated conclusions, separating out distinct coexistent literary strands and avoiding overstatement. There are a few minor slips: it is Effi's father, not her mother, who invites her to return home after her marriage is over, and the 'Schellfische' Friiulein Karoline can barely stomach are haddock, not shellfish. Overall, however, this is rewarding and illuminating reading for all those with an interest in gender studies, in the relationship between medical discourse and literature, or in nineteenth-century fiction. UNIVERSITYOF ST ANDREWS HELEN CHAMBERS Geschichte und Epigonen: 'i9. J7ahrhundert' / 'Postmoderne', Stifter / Bernhard. By MARCUS HAHN. (Rombach Wissenschaften, Reihe Cultura, 35) Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. 2003. 5o8 pp. E42. ISBN 3-7930-9367-x. This is an ambitious doctoral dissertation from Konstanz. It is one of those disser tations which, rather than foregrounding a text, a corpus, or some such object of knowledge, ismore concerned with methodology and meta-level. Hence those who approach this book with an unmediated cognitive interest in Stifter or Bernhard, nineteenth-century literary history, or postmodernity may be disappointed. Of 467 pages of text, only some ioo are actually devoted to theAustrian writers' work; and these are in the nature of a test-bed for the theory. The rest is given over toHahn's consideration of his meta-problem, namely, the conditions of the possibility of the relation of literary historiography to its intended object of knowledge, literature, in today's horizon of knowledge. Roughly speaking, it is argued that to read a literary text as literature (reading qua construction, in a strong, transitive, hermeneutic sense) intrinsically competes with a reading of the text aspart of literary history (constructing ameta-story of literary development with reference to extratextual historical reality). This-for Hahn-inconveniently disjunctive relation is further complicated by the MLR, IOI.2, 2oo6 575 familiar difficulties posed for historiography by poststructuralist theory from Roland Barthes and Hayden White onwards. The object domain of history, including literary history, being absent and untestable by any known (for example) natural-scientific procedures, is constituted solely by textual constructions. What, then, is a fact?What is objectivity (etc.)? The answer lies on the one hand in arguments of Michel de Certeau. We must grant a certain acceptance of the illusion of objective reality as constituted by the historiographical narrative-if this acceptance is ironic and provi sional. Otherwise, the nearest thing...