The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben and Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer

Anna Helm

The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy: Gustav Freytag's  Soll und Haben  and Adalbert Stifter's  Der Nachsommer
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Verlag Peter Lang
Country
Switzerland
Published
7 May 2009
Pages
181
ISBN
9783039110841

The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy: Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer

Anna Helm

This work explores the intersection of the material and poetic economies in Soll und Haben and Der Nachsommer. It demonstrates how the main poetical strategies of the two novels, dichotomization (Soll und Haben) and total economization (Der Nachsommer), are defined by economic themes, structures, and forms. The economopoetics of the novels, i.e. the multitude of connections between economics and aesthetics, pervades the texts on three different levels: as content, as representational model, and as literary strategy. Although very different in their treatment of topics relating to business and economics, both novels are driven by narratives parsed with economic expression. The diverging patterns of economopoetics support central commentaries on their underlying realist aesthetics. One important finding is that, in spite of money’s apparent absence from the core content of some literary texts, economic relations are inherent in the narrative structure of those texts. The book shows that economopoetics is relevant not only to any extant literature which attempts explicitly to thematize business and economics (such as Soll und Haben), but also to that which does not (such as Der Nachsommer). Economic organizing principles are pervasive signatures of the novel’s aesthetic.

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