(review)

Abstract

870 Reviews attempt is made by the authors to make it do so (or to relate to Bohm's introduction to the subject). The total exclusion of Zacharias Werner (but the inclusion of the unspeakable Fouque) baffles me. Let's face it: a large amount of Romantic drama is junk (but fascinating junk nevertheless). But where you do have a dramatist who was successful in his own day and was also the enunciator of significant Romantic aspirations, you have at least to justify his banishment. Is this a challenge to the Kluckhohnian canon? We need to know. The volume is, as said, superbly edited, and almost freeof slips. The bibliographical material is impressive in the extreme and will provide more than enough for inter? ested readers at all levels. There are colour illustrations of paintings by Runge and Friedrich. I draw attention to the following small points: the trulyterrible translation of 'Waldeinsamkeit' on pp. 120-21; the wrong translation of Die Gleichen, p. 135; 'Fiisseli' (p. 276, for 'Fiissli'), 'Skammandros' (p. 285, for 'Scamander'), 'Bassege' (p. 286, for 'Bassenge'); the title of Tieck's novel (passim) should be William Lovell; the correct date of Genoveva (pp. 129, 368) is 1800. Trinity College, Cambridge Roger Paulin Ich-Erzdhlen: Anmerkungen zu Wilhelm Raabes Realismus. By Nathali JuckstockKiessling . (Palaestra, 318) Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2004. 348 pp. ?49.90. ISBN 3-525-20592-9. Wilhelm Raabe has been rescued from the baleful grip of his 'friends' in an energetic campaign over several decades based in the main on two propositions: that he was not a conservative, nationalist writer conformed to bourgeois provincialism but a dissident liberal, even a 'Linksintellektueller' (Hermann Helmers), and that his narrative ingenuity, which baffled and annoyed critics throughout his career, actually constitutes his originality, superior realist awareness, and anticipatory 'modernity'. In a study based on an Erlangen dissertation, Nathali Jiickstock-Kiessling is rightly sceptical of excessive claims for Raabe of an advanced political position, but this is not her subject; rather she pursues an exacting account of the import of his narrative devices, largely grounded in the analytic narratology of Gerard Genette. However, it turns out that her enquiry leads her primarily into intertextuality,and it is here that she obtains her most original and unexpected results. Raabe remained notoriously abstinent from the voluminous critical discourse of his time; unlike other writers, he wrote nothing about literary theory and but one insignificant book review. But Jiickstock-Kiessling discovers that his well-known richness of literary quotation and allusion is not merely a matter of flaunting tags and creating recognition puzzles for the reader, but constitutes an aggressive critique of the poetological conventions governing the realist epoch. As though replicating a Raabean strategy,she begins with a chapter on his abandoned last novel Altershausen, which is then followed by her introduction. In Altershausen she is much concerned with the shift from firstto third person, which she sees not as a fresh experiment but as a breach in narrative time relationships and a regression into conventional sentimentality. Raabe could not advance to a modern narration to show the disintegration of the subject consciousness, so, with his char? acteristic honesty, he broke offthe novel. Jiickstock-Kiessling evidently regards it as an axiom of modernity that there is no integrity of the individual self or reliable perception of reality. She comments on a substantial number of Raabe's texts but concentrates with intensive close reading on a limited selection. The insistence ofthe narrator of Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse that he is not writing a novel distances the work from classical-Romantic conventions. The second novel, Ein Fruhling, which MLR, 100.3, 2005 871 Raabe disliked even after he revised it, fails by forcing incompatible narrative tradi? tions together in simultaneous pursuit of aesthetic totality and realistic rounding; the revision (recently available in the critical edition) has been made more reductively conventional. A centrepiece of the book is an extensive examination of the succession of Der Hungerpastor to Gustav Freytag's Soil und Haben, a link that, though acknowledged in some sort by Raabe scholars, has been rather evaded, perhaps in apprehension that his standing would be diminishedby association with Freytag's bestseller. JiickstockKiessling takes...