Histories of realism: Stifter, Storm, and Meyer in the age of Ranke.

摘要

The dissertation examines reciprocal relations between two forms of historical discourse that emerged simultaneously in the nineteenth century: realist historical fiction and the academic discourse of objective history. Concentrating on historiographical texts by Leopold von Ranke, as well as on historical novellas by Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the study investigates realism's response to the increasing professionalization of the discipline of history in the nineteenth century.; With the advent of modern Geschichtswissenschaft came a narrow, state-oriented definition of the historian's appropriate subject matter. How does Ranke's limited conception of what merits historical representation drive other, more inclusive forms of historical writing out of the academic setting and into the literary domain? I argue that historical fiction played a crucial role in broadening historical discourse in the nineteenth century, often broaching practical and theoretical concerns scarcely admissible in ninteenth-century academic institutions. Realism's historiographic metafictions self-consciously reflect on the epistemological aporias of objective history, the status and selection of historical evidence, the definition of the historically significant, and the ideological uses and abuses of history.; Chapter one examines Ranke's model of objective history and its relationship to realist discourse. The second chapter approaches Stifter's Die Narrenburg (1841) as an early intervention in discussions of historical mimesis and as an attempt to negotiate a discursive role in the historical domain for those individuals and groups excluded by academic historians. Two of Storm's Chroniknovellen, Renate (1878) and Zur Chronik von Gieshuus (1884) are analysed in chapter three: Storm stages the acts of historical representation and reception in order to expose the ideologically mediated quality of historical documentation and undermine the type of monologic master narrative advocated by historians such as Ranke. The final chapter argues that Meyer's Das Leiden eines Knaben (1883) and Der Heilige (1879) deliberately foreground and critique the role played by social dynamics of race, class, and gender in the scripting of history. The study aims to demonstrate realism's involvement with issues concerning the politics of historical representation that continue to trouble our twentieth-century historical consciousness.