Preface: Revisiting Verklärung Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke University of Zurich / Columbia University Beginning with the 1850s, German-language literature, especially prose fiction, began to be considered a special kind of realism: a realism distinguished by its “poetic” qualities� And yet, one might wonder whether the narrative fiction of authors like Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, and Gottfried Keller is so different from the nuanced character portraits found in Balzac’s Comédie humaine, published in the 1830s and 1840s, or from the depiction of people from all strata of Victorian society in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South from 1854-55� Along the same lines, one might ask whether there is a particular kind of realism that differentiates the fictions of French and British authors from Austria, Switzerland, and Prussia from each other (Begemann, 7-9)� With this collection of essays on realism, we hope to give some new energy to this discussion, which lies at the heart of German-language literature of the mid-nineteenth century� To do justice to the rich variety of poetological programs and styles found under the label of “poetic” realism, we must first differentiate between individual authors and then seek out these authors’ reflections on realism - to be found not only in their programmatic statements, but also in their writing practices� This is one of the key considerations motivating this special issue� Thus, our collection of essays focuses on such well-known novels of the 1850s as Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855), Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (first version 1854-55), and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer: Eine Erzählung (1857), as well as two novellas by Keller - Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1847, 1855-56) and Die mißbrauchten Liebesbriefe (1860, 1865) - and Stifter’s novella Brigitta (1844)� Analyzed, too, is Stifter’s thick description of the solar eclipse of 1842, a text, which - like a lens-- refracts and magnifies the poetological concerns of the mid-century� Ever semantically multivalent, “realism” has become an umbrella term under which many discourses and disciplines from a variety of periods have been able to accommodate a range of concerns (Sachs-Hombach 21)� “Poetic” realism in German-language literature emerged around the time that the politically engaged journalism and poetry of the pre-revolutionary era came to an end, its 294 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke political aspirations lost after 1848� It was then that literary production found itself in a crisis� Its disillusionment with politics did not, however, provoke a return to earlier aesthetic programs based on classicist or romanticist idealizations, but brought about a turn to what was considered actual, real, and realistic� This engagement with the contemporary world was to be different, too, from the mere quasi-photographic representation of the given reality, with all of its warts, prosaic triviality, and misery; in other words, it was to be a “poetic” kind of realism� Such, at least, is the narrative of the emergence of “poetic” realism by literary historians� We find this account very early, in Julian Schmidt - concurrent, in fact, with the appearance of the literary phenomenon he claims to describe� Schmidt’s account might have aligned well with the classically liberal, nationalist goals of the journal Die Grenzboten, which he edited together with Freytag between 1842 and 1861� It might also have fitted the literary program Freytag envisaged for his own realist narratives� However, for the purposes of our investigation of the specific goals and strategies of poetic realism, we need to spell out in greater detail what was meant by this “poetic” realism, and then probe to what extent such a program was actually adopted and practiced by the realist writers of that time - especially authors of narrative fiction, whereas poets pursue own and other goals (Begemann and Bunke 2019, 10-31)� Beyond Julian Schmidt, a number of other literary historians have also built discussions of realism in German literature on programmatic accounts of “poetic” realism� In the reaction to the theoretical orientation of the humanities in the 1960s, this approach to “poetic” realism found its way into studies of realism in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, even into Hanser’s now canonical Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur� Both Hugo Aust’s Literatur des Realismus (1977) and Gerhard Plumpe’s contribution to the volume Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit 1848-1890 (1996) sought to ground the realist program in its historical context, as a rejection of ideals and utopias in favor of the more concrete power politics of “Realpolitik�” Moreover, they claimed, modern science and the scientific method heightened the tension between realism and idealism to such an extent that the representation of the ideal became increasingly unreal and increasingly ideological� Against this backdrop, Plumpe then summarized the agenda and key concepts of realism, which he had already elaborated in his “Theorie des bürgerlichen Realismus,” where he distinguished between an understanding of reality as a given and reality as a “poetic” interpretation� On the one hand, the literature of “poetic” realism does not aim at reproducing an existing reality - as would be the case, for instance, in the medium of photography - but aims, instead, at a union between the ideal and the real� And, on the other hand, the literature of “poetic” realism tends to mark its own literariness or artistic value, especially when it insists on literature’s aesthetic qualities - Preface: Revisiting Verklärung 295 qualities that provide a Verklärung of reality, i�e� a purification, clarification, or idealization that allows the beauty of reality to shine forth in its unadulterated nature� Thus, Verklärung both legitimates realist literature’s position within the arts and implies rules of exclusion and inclusion, which govern the choice of appropriate themes and subject matter (Plumpe, Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit 52-55)� Current discussions of realism in German literature seem to share with this tradition the agreement that literary realism should be approached in terms of a program that articulates the affordances of literary works� For the most part, however, the idea of Verklärung as the key to that program has been discarded� There is a consensus that, while “poetic” realism does not aim at representing an existing reality, it does stage the constitution, construction, and representation of that reality� Thus, to a certain extent, recent scholarship on the literature of realism from the nineteenth century to today has focused primarily on the poetical means that disclose the realm of possibilities existing between reality and representation (Darstellung)� In these developments, the epithet “poetic” undergoes a series of substitutions: Plumpe offered bürgerlich (bourgeois) as the new specification; “programmatic,” “literary,” “aesthetic,” “figural,” “complex,” “structural” are more recent candidates� And instead of a singular realism, we get a plurality of “realisms�” For German Studies, especially Germanistik scholarship, the paradigm of Darstellung goes back to the success of that concept in the 1990s, when - as Frauke Berndt shows in her survey of the scholarship on realism 1 - the adoption of the complex model of representation was accompanied by a return to Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Hans Blumenberg, and Nelson Goodman� Semiotic, rhetorical, and narrative techniques resulting in “realism effects” are of primary interest in this respect� They are part of those forms of literary representation that address fundamental problems of reference (Thanner et al� 9) and the limits of representation (Marszałek and Mersch 10; Birke and Butter 3; Öhlschläger et al� 7-8) between “self-observation and self-presentation” (Arndt 3)� The past three years, which saw the bicentennials of Keller and Fontane in 2019, have also yielded the publication of three remarkable monographs on literary realism of the long nineteenth century, all of which approach their subject matter through broad textual analyses� Eric Downing explores “some of the more salient connections between the practices of reading and magic during the realist and modernist periods in German literature and thought, with a particular focus on the magic most closely aligned with practices of divination” (Downing 2), showing that, among all forms of representation, it is those we consider aesthetic-magical procedures that most 296 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke inform realist texts� Elisabeth Strowick’s recent book examines how reality and perception are tightly interrelated in the literature of realism: “Art becomes mimesis of a production aesthetics of the senses that defines reality” (Strowick 3)� 2 This psychology of perception applies not only to the sight of the physical organ but also to that of an inner vision: “Realism - one might say - appears primarily in the difference and distance between perception and reference� Reality is an effect of perception, an effect of the independent life of the senses which articulate the character of reality as a simulacrum” (Strowick 4)� And finally, in her forthcoming study, Erica Weitzman examines the connection between realism and obscenity, showing realism’s dependence on the “permissibility or impermissibility of sensual representation per se,” with all its challenges to artistic portrayal (Weitzman 4)� 3 While the sober textual model of representation attained the status of a prominent paradigm, the model of Verklärung, unattractive to the politically engaged historians of the late twentieth century, was left to collect dust in the attic� It is not until 2015, with the publication of Moritz Baßler’s innovative study of a century of German prose narrative, that we find a return to Verklärung� In his monograph, Baßler reactivates Verklärung as a complex poetological concept that can elucidate some of the key stylistic features of nineteenth-century prose fiction� Verklärung extends far beyond the deliberate filtering out of such unpleasant facts of contemporary reality as dying children and social misery, which Theodor Fontane designated as subjects unfit for literary representation (Fontane 7-15)� With regard to Fontane’s realism, too, it must be noted that this frequently quoted filter model of Verklärung considerably predates the core of his literary production, which, in fact, does not shy away from the darker sides of contemporary reality� It is Keller’s letter to his friend and fellow writer Berthold Auerbach that offers the clearest model of Verklärung as a poetic strategy that goes beyond the selective representation of a given reality - for Keller, Verklärung designates an idealizing intervention in the reality of his readers, coupled with the intention of radically and enduringly transforming it: [D]agegen halte ich es für Pflicht eines Poeten, nicht nur das Vergangene zu verklären, sondern das Gegenwärtige, die Keime der Zukunft so weit zu verstärken und zu verschönern, daß die Leute nun glauben können, ja, so seien sie, und so gehe es zu! Thut man dies mit einiger wohlwollenden Ironie, die dem Zeuge das falsche Pathos nimmt, so glaube ich, daß das Volk das, was es sich gutmüthig einbildet zu sein und der innerlichen Anlage nach auch schon ist, zuletzt in der That und auch äußerlich wird� Kurz, man muß, wie man schwangeren Frauen etwa schöne Bildwerke vorhält, dem allezeit trächtigen Nationalgrundstock stets etwas Besseres zeigen, als er schon ist� (Keller 195) 4 Preface: Revisiting Verklärung 297 According to Keller’s rather ironic statement, Verklärung should not be directed at the past, where it can be a mere indulgence in nostalgia, but at the present reality of a reading public, in order to strengthen and better that public with an eye to the future� This temporal aspect of the poet’s intervention in the present - appealing, by an idealizing effect, to deep-seated hopes and future aspirations - is based on the religious notion of the term Verklärung� In English, the temporal aspect of Verklärung is captured by the term “transfiguration”, a word reserved almost exclusively for reference to the transformation of Jesus on Mount Tabor, as narrated in the Gospels� In that scene, inserted before the account of the Passion, Jesus suddenly appears to three of his disciples in a brilliant white garment, flanked by Moses and Elija, thus embodying his future, post-Resurrection status and revealing himself to his followers as the Son of God (Matt� 17�2; Mark 9�2-10; Luke 9�28-36)� In most Christian theological and liturgical traditions, this scene marks a powerful and permanently transformative intervention in the present of a collectivity (the disciples), propelling it into a better future� This is not to say that all uses of the German term activate its temporal dimension by way of this theological tradition, nor, importantly, that all uses of it necessarily carry religious intention, in line with Christian teaching� However, the religious dimension of the term Verklärung must have been present enough in the popular imagination that the word could be activated and transformed into a perfectly secular artistic device, as is the case in the above-quoted passage� In the nineteenth century, independent of Gottfried Keller, this kind of strategic deployment of Verklärung could also be found in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy when he invokes Raphael’s last painting The Transfiguration of Christ� Keller’s use of Verklärung relies on the term’s religious dimension in order to communicate a particular model of temporality and transformation� But Keller also radically secularizes and materializes this model by substituting the powerful appeals of narcissism and the lasting effects of clever breeding for the enduring power of a transformative theophany� He does this, first, by alluding to the superstitious belief that the highly susceptible imagination of a pregnant woman could transmit impressive sights or images to an unborn child and, second, in his comparison of the treatment of pregnant women to the recommended treatment of the national reading public, switching the term for pregnancy from that used for humans (schwanger) to that used for livestock (trächtig). Ultimately, Keller compares the poet’s task of educating a national public to the cattle breeder’s improvement of his livestock, both a “transfiguration” of the present and the seeds or genetic material of the future (Keime der Zukunft)� If realism aims, then, at an intervention in reality by way of fabricating an idealized representation of reality, it does so by using and transforming the imagery 298 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke and language of the popular imagination, shaping the reading public through the literature that informs its identity and tradition� Baßler’s analysis of a century of different forms of prose fiction between 1850 and 1950 begins with an investigation of Verklärung� Against the backdrop of Roman Jakobson’s poetics ( Jakobson 95-114), he argues that the literary strategy of Verklärung emerges as a historically specific instantiation of strategies of representation (Darstellung)� Whereas earlier novels and novellas associated with the period of German classicism around 1800 tend to deploy metaphorical procedures, by 1850, the time we associate with the beginning of German realism, we can observe the rise of metonymical procedures� In other words, whereas Goethe and his contemporaries aim at symbolic closure, the later realists have a more problematic relationship to the framing and stabilizing of their narratives� On the one hand, realist authors aim at endowing their fictional world with symbolic significance and thereby transfiguring it, which they accomplish through recourse to allegory as a means to arrest the metonymical drift at the level of narration� On the other hand, this use of allegory in realist narrative fiction is not brought to full symbolic closure� Instead, it tends to be counterbalanced on the level of plot and character by an ethics of renunciation or resignation (Entsagung) - an ethical concept that made its way from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795), Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/ 29) into the realistic paradigm� This counterstrategy produces a suspension of closure, resulting in a particular kind of ambiguity that can be captured in the image of the Kippfigur (the ambiguous reversible image where the beholder’s perception can alternate, for instance, between seeing a rabbit and seeing a duck)� The function of this ambiguity consists in establishing a fragile balance: too much naturalistic, metonymical narration requires symbolic strategies of transfiguration (Verklärung), and too much idealist, metaphorical narration calls for renunciation (Entsagung) (Baßler 54-58; 58-77)� In his discussion of the realist strategy of Verklärung, Plumpe already points out a fundamental awareness of structure (Plumpe, Theorie des bürgerlichen Realismus 37), on which Kammer and Krauthausen build in their study Make it Real: Für einen strukturalen Realismus� They too analyze the concept of Verklärung and the above-quoted letter from Keller to Auerbach, in which they see the articulation of Keller’s program for the literary construction of reality, which allows for the intervention and transformation of the experiential base of reality (Kammer and Krauthausen 30)� This intervention becomes manifest in the manifold techniques of self-reflexivity: textual reflection on the level of rhetorical figures, symbolism, and documentary status, as well as rich relationships of intertextuality� When Kammer and Krauthausen point out that narrative fiction Preface: Revisiting Verklärung 299 of the nineteenth century “wants to be celebrated in the precarious glamour of its own structural conditions,” their phrase replaces the paradigm of representation with that of Verklärung, a kind of Verklärung that includes all phenomena of representation, as well as something more than representation (Kammer and Krauthausen 34)� It was in that sense, too, that Rolf Rudolf Helmstetter summed up the structure of these texts, bringing back the classic epithet “poetic”: “We call a style or a textual structure ‘poetically realist’ when it manages to establish a balance between the polarity of the text’s mimetic reference and its selfreference” (Helmstetter 36)� The complex paradigm of Verklärung, especially once we consider it part of the paradigm of Darstellung, can provide insight into the different concepts of realism of the 1850s, which we explore in this issue� It allows us to group all of these approaches under the concept of reality as a construct, or of a reality that appears at the limits of what can be perceived and represented� This, then, is the second claim we would like to present for discussion in light of the essays gathered for this special issue� The literary realists investigated here do not take reality to be only a varying construct, or even ultimately beyond the reach of perception and representation; rather, they actively make reality-construction into an important element of their aesthetic programs� Some of them do so in the manner in which they treat sensory experience and basic forms through which it is organized and oriented, be that in spatial or temporal terms, in terms of light and sound sources, or with regard to other benchmarks and standards of orientation� The essays by Elisabeth Strowick, Karin Neuburger, and Eva Horn focus on the work of Adalbert Stifter, including his novel Der Nachsommer, his novella Brigitta, and his shorter prose pieces� Additionally, it is Stifter’s vivid description of the solar eclipse of 1842, appearing in the same year as this astronomical spectacle, that allows us to reframe many assumptions about the phase of literary production around 1850, particularly the assumption of a unifying element across several apparently different forms of realism� It might not, after all, have been the lost political aspirations of 1848 that ignited this phase of literary production, though this has often been viewed as its trigger� Instead, the uniting force of this era might have to be sought in its new and different understanding of reality - of reality as a construct, or of reality at the limits the perceptible, rather than reality purely as a given� Strowick shows that darkness, in Stifter’s text, as it displaces the source of light by way of its inertia and passivity, becomes the creative force that allows, in fact, for the appearance of the effects of light in the first place� So it is that Stifter’s mise en scène of the solar eclipse offers to his readers a model of aesthetic production that radically undoes traditional 300 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke creation myths and can, according to Strowick, be understood as the primal scene of modern aesthetics� But how, then, does Stifter’s aesthetic program, which situates literature at the threshold of the undoing of traditionally established indicators, benchmarks, or rules for our orientation in the world, apply to his later work? How is it related to Stifter’s self-proclaimed strategy of Verklärung, exhibited in the idyllic, harmonized setting of the Rosenhaus in Der Nachsommer? Neuburger approaches this question, first, by focusing on an analysis of Stifter’s “Ein Gang durch die Katakomben,” a text published just a year before his account of the solar eclipse� She traces Stifter’s treatment of the loss of light and of all points of reference in the inward turn of this account, culminating in the realization that it is ultimately live, in-person conversation among people that provides a measure and point of reference for the subject� Then, turning to Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, Neuburger shows how this provides access to what one might call, with Hannah Arendt, the political dimension of Stifter’s realism� Apart from this political dimension, there is also the question of Adalbert Stifter’s relationship to changing benchmarks in science� Stifter’s concern with meteorological phenomena has been frequently observed and analyzed, but his treatment of climate, i�e�, the long-term, average weather conditions of a region - something much less dramatic and far more difficult to observe and measure - has not received much attention� Horn offers a detailed examination of Stifter’s scientific writing and his realist fiction, especially his novella Brigitta, and its relationship to the changing field of climate science� She shows that, when the nineteenth century saw a decisive shift in the scientific understanding of climate, away from the traditional European model that conceived of climate as a product both of natural conditions as well as cultural interventions by humans, Adalbert Stifter was both aware of and critical of these new scientific approaches to climate, evident in both his own scientific writings and his realist fiction� As already mentioned, Gustav Freytag not only edited Die Grenzboten with Julian Schmidt but was also eager to promote the classically liberal agenda of this journal by way of his own realist fiction� Both Sebastian Meixner and Michael Lipkin turn their attention to this author, who has lost much of his nineteenth-century popularity� In his novel Soll und Haben, Freytag aims at demonstrating the value and rewards of joining the merchant class through an active commitment to order and productivity; even the keywords of his novel, debit and credit, cite the headings of an accounting sheet� Meixner points out that the novel’s reality-ordering benchmarks are rooted in an economic model that defines the thresholds of circulation, of what is owed, of what is contained, and, by implication, of what is superfluous and hence to be avoided� His analysis Preface: Revisiting Verklärung 301 of the way in which the novel deals with abundance and excess shows, however, that, from a rhetorical and stylistic point of view, Freytag’s purported commitment to the economic virtues of accuracy and parsimony are destabilized - if not entirely undermined - by these benchmarks, relying as they do on a stable economic order� Lipkin’s analysis focuses on Freytag’s attempt to promote for his contemporary readers a particularly important virtue, namely, one’s commitment to an active engagement with contemporaneous society and the present� He analyzes Freytag’s concern with the present as a programmatic rejection of romanticism and the promotion of a particular order and work ethic, elaborated in Soll und Haben’s contrasting treatment of the behavior typical of the members of distinct social classes� Even as the novel invests its representational energy in an idealized description of the virtue of being committed to the present - something constitutive of the habitus of the merchant class, in contrast to the nostalgic vanity of the nobility and the economic ambition of Jews - it also subverts its own goals: the intended commitment to the present as open and changing is undermined by the novel’s own reliance on a portrait of a stable social structure, static social classes, and anti-Semitic stereotypes� Frauke Berndt’s, Dorothea von Mücke’s, and Cornelia Pierstorff’s essays focus on Gottfried Keller’s narrative fiction� Berndt draws out the implications for a structural realism of vegetation, particularly grass, of which detailed descriptions play an important role in much realist prose, and especially in Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich� By way of a close reading of the cemetery scene from the beginning of the story of Henry’s youth, noting parallels of this scene with the novel’s famous studio scene, where Henry gets involved in an abstract drawing composed of random strokes with a pen, Berndt investigates the structural dimension of Keller’s realism and, in dialogue with recent research on realism, recalls Blumenberg’s distinction between reality and “world,” allowing us to recognize what makes realism “real�” Thus, Keller’s realism does not represent a reality but, instead, the ontological structure of the world realized by his novels� This ontological structure of realization is characterized by the tension between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real - the last of which is due to how the fabric and texture of reality itself come into view� Von Mücke analyzes the articulation of Keller’s realist poetics as it is presented in the intertextual network of his Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, showing how this transfer of Shakespeare’s tragedy from its original setting in Renaissance Verona to rural Switzerland of the mid-nineteenth century by no means promotes hyper-localized, provincial politics in a folkloric costume, but, on the contrary, engages with the re-making of a classic work of world literature� 302 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke Keller’s Shakespeare adaptation offers to its readers a poetological reflection on realism as well as its “poetic” execution� Plot elements, names, and primarily analogies at the level of narration borrow from a wide range of cultures, including the classical tradition, the Bible, Arabic poetry, Jewish mysticism, and Pietism - in order to evoke and affirm a this-worldly vision of paradise and the universality of the longing for a loving home - thus instantiating and validating Verklärung as a symbolic practice� Pierstorff’s close reading of Die mißbrauchten Liebesbriefe shows how both plot and character development in the novella can be expounded by the analytical tools of rhetoric, by focusing on the concept of catachresis (abusio)� It holds an exceptional position within rhetoric in that it provides a critical approach to metaphor: it calls attention both to operations of substitution and to the differentiation between literal and figural expression� For Keller, she argues, catachresis also extends beyond these semantic and linguistic concerns� The epistolary exchange at the center of his novella also follows the logic of catachresis, inviting a reflection on the medium and form of epistolarity itself� Moreover, along with catachresis, we can observe an “authenticity effect,” which Keller deploys in order to reflect on the epistolary medium� Pierstorff’s essay thus addresses one of the central poetological issues of Keller’s period, the dilemma of epigonality, and contributes from this angle to the contemporaneous debate on realism� If, at this point, we return to our initial question of whether “poetic” realism is an exclusively German-language invention, we might conclude that - at least with regard to the epithet “poetic” - this is probably the case� With regard to the subject matter, however, the same cannot be said� For the realism of Stifter, Freytag, Keller, and the other authors of the period shares many of its features with the realism of Balzac, Gaskell, or Eliot� Realism, moreover, has neither an exclusively political agenda nor a unified style and subject matter, and, for this reason, the claim that realism only exists in the plural can indeed be made for the nineteenth century, especially if this includes a comparative perspective� However, it would be a pity to renounce the epithet “poetic�” For it is especially the reconstruction of the historical semantics of the “poetic” that leads us to such a central and rich paradigm as Verklärung� Replacing the latter with the ahistorical paradigm of Darstellung would mean the loss of focus on complex treatments of reality, which extend beyond techniques of representation� Verklärung takes us to metaphysical structures in a capacious sense: the structure of reality as it is articulated in the form of the novels and prose narratives of the 1850s� To the extent that these forms tend to be ironically refracted and highly self-reflexive with regard to their artificiality, the texts and their authors Preface: Revisiting Verklärung 303 can then be freed from ideological suspicion� The epithet “poetic” both affirms realism and rejects any notion of a mere reproduction or imitation of reality� Notes 1 See Frauke Berndt’s article on Gottfried Keller’s structural realism in this issue� 2 All translations from German secondary literature are by Dorothea von Mücke� 3 Erica Weitzman has generously provided us with the proofs of her forthcoming book� 4 “By contrast, I consider it the duty of a poet to idealize [verklären] not only the past but also the present, and to strengthen and beautify the germs of the future such that people are willing to believe that yes, indeed, they are exactly like that and it is exactly like that that things are dealt with! If this is done with a sufficient dose of well-meaning irony, which manages to cut through any false pathos, I believe people will become what in a well-intentioned manner they imagine themselves to be and what, according to their inner potential, they already are� In brief, just as one presents to pregnant women beautiful paintings, one has to present to the always expectant [trächtig] national base something better than what it currently is” (transl� Dorothea von Mücke) Works Cited Arndt, Christiane� Abschied von der Wirklichkeit: Probleme bei der Darstellung von Realität im deutschsprachigen literarischen Realismus� Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2009� Aust, Hugo� Literatur des Realismus� Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977� Baßler, Moritz� Deutsche Erzählprosa 1850-1950: Eine Geschichte literarischer Verfahren� Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2015� Begemann, Christian, ed� Realismus: Epoche, Autoren, Werke� Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007� Begemann, Christian, and Simon Bunke, ed� Lyrik des Realismus� Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2019� Berndt, Frauke, and Cornelia Pierstorff, ed� Realismus/ Realism� Spec� issue of Figurationen 20�1 (2019)� Birke, Dorothee, and Stella Butter, ed� Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013� Downing, Eric� The Chain of Things: Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850-1940� Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2018� Eisele, Ulf� Realismus und Ideologie: Zur Kritik der literarischen Theorie nach 1848 am Beispiel des “Deutschen Museums.” Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976� 304 Frauke Berndt and Dorothea von Mücke Fauth, Søren R�, and Rolf Parr, ed� Neue Realismen in der Gegenwartsliteratur� Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016� Fontane, Theodor� “Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848�” 1853� Sämtliche Werke. 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