The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)

By: Alexander Sorenson

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: The Waiting Water addresses one of the most recurrent and troubling motifs in German Realist literature—death by drowning. Characters find themselves before bodies of water, presented with the familiar realm above the surface and the unobservable, uncanny domain beneath it. With somber regularity, they then disappear into the depths. Alexander Sorenson explores the role that these hidden deaths in water play within a literary movement that set out precisely to reveal universal truths about human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolve around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism—order and sacrifice.Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs, The Waiting Water shows that the pervasive symbolism of drowning scenes in German Realism, which typically occur in zones of narrative invisibility on the social periphery, reveals the extent to which realist narrative uses the natural environment to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9781501777127
Related ISBNs:: 9781501777103, 9781501777110, 9781501777097
Publisher:: Cornell University Press
Date of Addition:: 09/15/24
Copyrighted By:: Alexander Sorenson
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Philosophy
Grade Levels:: Graduate Student
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.