The Waiting Water

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.

Alexander Sorenson is Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

With its considerable breadth of theoretical analysis and detailed engagement with literary texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, The Waiting Water compellingly traces the importance of drowning as a recurring and influential motif in German Realism, signifying religious, legal, economic, and aesthetic encounters between nature and human subjectivity.

Catriona MacLeod, University of Chicago:

The Waiting Water is an elegantly written and deeply learned study of water and drowning as ubiquitous and constitutive elements of Poetic Realism. Alexander Sorenson presents convincing and innovative readings of canonical nineteenth-century German authors that center on anthropological, ecocritical, theological, and philosophical dimensions of sacrifice in and through water.