Discourses of Adventure Between Colonialism and National Socialism 2: Transformations of the Adventure in Bourgeois Realism

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Lüdemann
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317336461

The project aims at exploring transformations of the adventure as a narrative and experiential pattern in German bourgeois realism (Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane). It takes its starting point from the observation that, in spite of the manifest rejection of adventure by realist literary programs, and in spite of its elimination from the official self-understanding of bourgeois society, realist literature is subliminally ‘haunted’ by adventure tales and narrative patterns which, in a way, do not cease not to disappear from the bourgeois world. Although in realist fiction the adventurer is often staged as the antitype of the bourgeois (e. g. in Wilhelm Raabe’s narratives), the question of whether (and how) the bourgeois world itself is still capable of adventure, and thus capable of being narrated, plays a prominent role from Freytag to Fontane. By reconstructing the involvement of ‘high’ bourgeois realism with formula fiction and extra-literary (colonial) adventure discourses, the projects draws on its results from the first period of funding while at the same time opening new perspectives on the national literary field (Bourdieu) after 1848 and in the German Empire.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2568: Philology of Adventure