MLRy ioo.i, 2005 251 Gliickskonzeptionenim deutschenRoman von Wielands 'Agathon'bis Goethes 'Wahlver? wandtschaften'. By Alan Corkhill. (Saarbriicker Beitrage zur Literaturwissenschaft , 78) St. Ingbert: Rohrig. 2003. 251pp. ?24. ISBN 3-86110-340-0. The American Declaration of Independence speaks of the pursuit of happiness as one of the inalienable rights of the human self. That pursuit may, by that historical juncture, have become self-evident; but the nature of happiness itself was anything but. Alan Corkhill examines the exploration of happiness in nine German novels from the period 1766 to 1809. The texts in question are: Wieland's Agathon, Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim, Goethe's Werther, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Heinse's Ardinghello, Moritz's Anton Reiser, Tieck's William Lovell, and Sophie Mereau-Brentano's Amanda und Eduard. The topic of happiness or good fortune (in German the word 'Gliick' is a particularly broad term) embraces a great number of often dialectically related is? sues: is 'Gliick' earned or given, private or communal, moral or existential, cultural or natural, random or purposive, outward or inward, physical or spiritual? Corkhill's texts, as one might expect, give a variety of answers (many of them self-contradictory) to these questions. Corkhill is particularly impressive when gender issues come into play; the discussion of Amanda und Eduard is thoughtful and perceptive. Moreover, his text corpus is very suggestive; that is to say, his nine novels debate interestingly and suggestively with each other. The one reservation I have is that at times his approach is very thematic and discur? sive. Remarks such as the following are symptomatic of what I mean. Of Ardinghello he writes: Auch wenn der Titelheld fiirdie Pluralitat bzw. die fehlende Allgemeinverbindlichkeit des Gliicks pladiert, so hat doch Heinse die Voraussetzung nicht dafiir geschaffen, dass in einem einzigen Werk verschiedenen Personen (grund-)verschiedene oder nuancierte Auffassungen vom Gliick in den Mund gelegt werden' (p. 123). Or, in respect of William Lovell: 'Die vorliegendeUntersuchungzielt auf eine textnahe Lekture der in der Originalfassung des Romans verstreuten Uberlegungen zur Gliicksfrage vor dem Hintergrunddamaliger Gliickstheorienab' (p. 162). In both cases, novels are being read forthe presence ofovert theories, views, and attitudes. The danger is, then, that fictional narratives are treated as iftheywere tracts; the literariness ofthe novels gets lost. But, to be fairto Corkhill, there is, indeed, a reflective,generalizing dimension to many of his texts and he helps us both to notice and to understand it. University College London Martin Swales Geschichte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft. By Stefan Nienhaus. (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 115) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2003. 405 pp. ?68. ISBN 3-484-32115-6. This is an excellent study of an important social and literary phenomenon of the Ro? mantic period in Berlin: the 'Deutsche Tischgesellschaft'. It is based on the surviving archival material (especially from 1811-16) and draws on printed sources only rarely consulted. It has not been easy to establish exactly what the 'Deutsche Tischgesellschaft' was. First and foremost, however, it was not the 'Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft', a misnomer that has insinuated itself into almost a century of scholarly research (including?mea culpa?my own) and is now finally scotched in this book. Nienhaus also puts paid to the assertions made by Reinhold Steig, in his Heinrich von Kleist's Berliner Kdmpfe (Berlin: Spemann, 1901), that Kleist was closely associated with the 'Tischgesellschaft' and thus partook of its socio-political animadversions, and by extension of its anti-Semitism. This cannot now be safely maintained. Steig, a 252 Reviews conservative figure in late Wilhelmine Romantic scholarship, the editor of Arnim's correspondence, was concerned to produce an image ofArnim (and Kleist) forhis own times, ifnecessary manipulating the evidence. The image of Arnim involved a noble, liberal-minded, patriotic, visionary Romantic, hemmed in by the political and social policies of the Hardenberg reforms. There was, of course, the question of his antiSemitism . The Arnim family managed successfully to keep its worst excesses under wraps; Jews writing on Arnim even overlooked it. Heine admired Arnim firstand foremost as a writer and seems to have been prepared to play down the other aspects. In 1908, Monty Jacobs included Halle undJerusalem in his selection ofArnim's works...