Reactionary romanticism: The figure of Italy and the desire for social privilege in the writings of Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Schlegel

摘要

The dissertation examines the figure of Italy as a topos of satisfied political desire in German fiction, travel narrative, and letters produced between 1795 and 1820. It traces how Italy functions as a metaphor for political desires forbidden by the socio-political realities of post-Revolutionary Germany, that is, for desires for privilege which defy the advancement of social equality. In so far as Italy provides a scene of wish-fulfillment, its narrative elaboration suggests a functional equivalence with the Freudian dream. Just as the dream satisfies desires repressed by the authority of the ego and super-ego, Italy satisfies desires repressed by the historical and cultural moment of both fictional protagonists and historical authors.;The dissertation examines how Italy is appropriated as an unconscious in Freudian terms by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Schlegel. These three writers in turn transfer their reactionary desires to their fictional portrayals of Italy. For example, Goethe's Italienische Reise (1816-17) advocates the staying power of the classical aesthetic ideal of the outgoing century and affirms Goethe as its stalwart embodiment. Tieck's William Lovell (1795) advocates the ancien regime upon which he himself relied for financial assistance as an independent author. Finally, in her unfinished novel Florentin (1801), Schlegel duplicates the oppressive gesture by which she had liberated herself from social ostracization as a well-educated, Jewish woman. Both author and fictional protagonist liberate themselves from social hierarchy by means of exclusivity; they limit freedom to a privileged, educated elite.;The dissertation concludes with a postscript which traces the contribution of post-Revolutionary German literature to the formation of Freud's dream-theory and which examines Freud's biography. As a Jewish doctor in fin-de-siecle Vienna, Freud had to 'escape' from the North in order to satisfy desires forbidden there just as the Romantic writers of this study and their protagonists had.