Representing history: Literary realism and historicist prose in nineteenth-century Germany

My dissertation explores the ways in which scholarly and non-scholarly historical discourses influenced one another's modes of representing history during the mid-nineteenth century in Germany. Scholarly historical discourse is often associated with the phenomenon of academic historicism that dominated academic life in Germany during the nineteenth century. By the 1830s, historicism had gained the status of a leading scholarly force; it mostly has become known as academic historiography, exemplified by Leopold von Ranke and Gustav Droysen.;This prevalence of scholarly historicism exerted a great influence on the literary realm. Nineteenth-century Germany witnessed the production of a large amount of historical-realist fiction, namely the genres of the historical novel and the historical novella. While previous research has often portrayed academic historicism and historical-realist prose as unrelated modes of historical representation, I show that, on the contrary, these non-fictional and fictional historical discourses are embedded in a complex model of discursive interaction in which they exchange rhetorical strategies of realism to represent history. Through this model, which integrates theoretical tenets of Roland Barthes and Niklas Luhmann, I demonstrate how this import and export of a “rhetoric of realism” shapes different forms of historical representation. In reading these different historical discourses together, I show not only that scholarly historicism availed itself of the rhetorical strategies of realism, but also that realist historical fiction actively experimented with scholarly historicist writing strategies. In creatively recycling these writing strategies, these fictional texts indeed problematize the very possibility of representing history in a scholarly, “objective” fashion and thus may voice non-established and non-institutionalized views of history. Chapter One demonstrates these processes of mutual influence by comparing the modes of representing history in Leopold von Ranke's historiography with those modes present in the realist historical prose of Viktor Scheffel and Adalbert Stifter. Chapter Two traces cases of this discursive interaction within the field of scholarly archeology, juxtaposing texts by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Raabe. Chapter Three addresses questions of the representation of German nationhood by comparing texts of historian Gustav Droysen with the works of literary authors Gustav Freytag and Gottfried Keller.