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Private life and domestic interiors play a central structuring role in German realist novels of the nineteenth century. Drawing on non-literary fields such as the social history of the family and the development of historicist styles of decoration, this study interprets the specifically narrative construction of this private space. In the works of major realist authors it traces the changing dimensions of the interior from its narrative stabilization in the 1850s through its social contestation in the Gründerzeit to its dissolution at the end of the century.
List of contents
Contents: Stabilization and disintegration of the middle-class or bourgeois domestic interior in realist novels by Stifter, Freytag, Spielhagen, Marlitt, Kretzer, Raabe, Fontane and Th. Mann.
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"øKirsten Belgum! argues persuasively that the domestic interior served as a means by which diverse authors established - and critiqued - aspects of German social, moral, and economic character. The illuminating study examines the correlation between changes in narrative structure and content, specifically regarding the treatment of the domestic interior as a register of bourgeois ideology as it was influenced by changes in economic position and social relations as the century progressed. ...an exemplary work." (Kathrine Kearney Maynard, History of European Ideas)
"Auf relative breiter Textbasis plausibilisiert die Vf.in unter umsichtiger Zusammenführung literatur-, sozial- und kunstgeschichtlicer Forschungsresultate griffige Thesen zur Funktion der Interieurgestaltung im Roman des bürgerlichen Realismus. Ihre Arbeit ist an keiner Stelle unbedacht oder flach, sondern hält sich ausgeglichen auf einem ansprechenden Niveau, was bei der praktizierten Interdisziplinarität keine geringe Leistung ist." (Michael Andermatt, Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft)
