Agnes Hoffmann: Landschaft im Nachbild: Imaginationen von Natur in der Literatur um 1900 bei Henry James und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2020. 356 pp.

This book makes an important contribution to the nexus of nature, aesthetics, vision, cultural critique, and modernist literature between 1880 and 1914 by comparing novellas and travel writings by Henry James and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Contesting the predominant scholarly understanding of modernist writers and critics’ rejection of 18^th- and 19^th-century aesthetic categories of landscape, such as the picturesque and the sublime, the author argues that what is generally considered as a relationship of estrangement, even separation, between modern Euro-American societies and nature in fact never ceases its engagement with nature. Not only do modernists – and James and Hofmannsthal in particular – continue to draw on preceding aesthetic categories, but they use them as central points of reference and reflection for aesthetic, poetic, visual, and epistemological questions and cultural critique. Indeed, the author contends, the usage of older visual and literary topoi constitutes a contemporary mode of negotiating as well as exploring the human-nature relationship in modernity. Skeptics might still expect that these negotiations and explorations are revisionary in the sense of critically countering preceding discursive engagements with nature. Yet this volume convincingly shows that the works of modernists like James and Hofmannsthal continue older conventions and aesthetic categories in a twofold manner: firstly, as traces inscribed into both the human retina and memory; and, secondly, as a self-conscious artistic and creative act (19–22). The idea related to the titular term and metaphor of the afterimage, or ‘Nachbild,’ involves these dual meanings and material as well as immaterial functions, and it is this idea that underscores one of the book’s central arguments, namely that landscape both shapes and is shaped by the reciprocal and multidimensional relationships between nature and culture.

The distinction between nature and nature as landscape, upon which this study is premised, is as important as it is fruitful for its discursive and interdisciplinary approach to James and Hofmannsthal’s artistic and critical engagement with nature. Broadly defined, nature as landscape pertains to ideas and practices of cultural formations and processes that emphasize the molding of nature in its various contexts, be they metaphysical, socio-political, aesthetic, or artistic. In short, nature as landscape involves the cultural formation of nature and, in turn, its effects on human culture and experience. Defined more narrowly, landscape refers to clearly circumscribed, selected views of nature that are closely associated with the visual arts, aesthetics, leisure, and travel. In the 19^th century, Europeans and Americans enjoyed, appreciated, and consumed landscapes as mass culture, art, and leisure activity. Landscape panoramas were popular, as were the great picture shows that staged large landscape paintings by, e. g., American artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. European landscape paintings by artists like William Turner and the Düsseldorf School of painting also attracted vast attention at home and internationally, and specific landscape sites became highly sought-out travel destinations around which mass tourism thrived. At the same time, landscapes were – and still are – constitutive to processes of territorial expansion and, therefore, important carriers of national identities and ideologies. Nature as landscape understood in this multifaceted way, then, underlies Hoffmann’s readings of selected writings by James and Hofmannsthal, enabling the author to illuminate the reciprocal and multidimensional cultural practices, traditions, and discourses at work in the human experience and contemplation of nature around 1900.

With its critical perspective of nature as landscape and the emphasis on reciprocity and discursivity, this study productively complicates our current approaches to nature in the environmental humanities, seeking to counter what appears to be a binary, and somewhat reductive, logic of opposition – ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’ – in theoretical and ecocritical approaches: “Diese Reziproziät ist das genaue Gegenteil einer binären Oppositionslogik von ‘Natur’ vs. ‘Kultur,’ das in gegenwärtigen Theorien des Anthropozän, z. B. bei Autoren wie Bruno Latour und Timothy Morton, aber auch in literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen des Ecocriticism immer wieder als ideologisches Basisaxiom des klassischen abendländischen Denkens diagnostiziert wird” (23). While the author’s insistence on distinguishing between nature and nature as landscape in theorizing about the nature-culture divide is a justified point of critique, the critique of the common assumption of a nature-culture binary is, however, somewhat misplaced. No doubt, the theoretical approaches by Latour and Morton, and, for that matter, also ecofeminist philosophers and feminist environmental humanities scholars like Karen J. Warren, Stacy Alaimo and Ursula Heise, can be productively combined with the approach taken here.^[1] After all, theories are important tools which prove fruitful despite their limitations – especially considering that ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are no theory or method in and by themselves but comprise a heterogenous field of investigation of human and nonhuman practices and interrelations, as well as material and immaterial phenomena.

What, then, does this volume’s insightful complication of our understanding of a modernist engagement with nature as landscape look like? The two main chapters about James and Hofmannsthal respectively examine first the aesthetic experience of landscape and the writers’ critical engagement with Victorian aesthetics as exemplified in early novellas before turning to the authors’ travel writings as cultural critique. Finally, each chapter returns to fictional works after 1900, addressing the link between the aesthetic experience of landscape and epistemological questions, as well as the writers’ positions regarding this connection.

James’ much neglected early novella, “A Landscape Painter” (1866/1885), proves to be an especially apt entrance into an investigation about modernist literature’s continued engagement with nature. Locksley, an amateur landscape painter from the educated urban upper class, takes refuge in the coastal regions of the East Coast after a failed romantic relationship. His experiences of nature and culture are highly attuned to established artistic practices and aesthetic conventions. Soon he also projects them onto the daughter of his host, Miriam Quarterly. By romanticizing and idealizing her as if she were an art object, Locksley fails to grasp the contexts of class and gender that determine her everyday life. His aesthetic desire and erotic attraction follow a tradition of landscape art and representation of women, whose conventions and iconographies bear the imprints of social hierarchies. Yet apart from James’ critical exposure of Locksley’s sexist and anthropocentric visions, Hoffmann demonstrates that the novella also seeks to rehabilitate “die konstruktiven und schöpferischen Aspekte der Wahrnehmung von Landschaft nach dem Modell der Kunst [...] als Teil einer fantasievollen Erschließung von Naturphänomenen” (110), thus productively adapting older traditions for a modern aesthetics of landscape and a self-conscious artistic imagination. Contrary to the scholarly consensus that Locksley’s vision and experience fail not only regarding his nature and gender experiences, but also his art production, the author unfolds the compelling argument that notwithstanding Locksley’s adherence to the dominant anthropocentric and phallogocentric power structures, he still undergoes a significant development in his aesthetic experience and artistic imagination of landscape.

The examination of James’ novella exemplifies the many merits shown by this volume’s discursive approach. Using the example of an outing to the beach, the author shows Locksley’s experience of a hitherto unknown landscape and figure constellation animated by Miriam’s apparition, which cannot be related to any of the contemporary American schools of painting, or any of the known Anglo-American afterimages. Rather, Locksley’s novel vision points to “zukunftsweisende Motive und Darstellungsweisen der modernen französischen Malerei” (115). Moreover, Locksley’s use of terminology when describing Miriam as a “dark spot in the picture” (qtd. in Hoffmann 114) links his aesthetic experience with the discourse of 19^th-century photography in the context of the marred reflection of a camera. Hoffmann thus reads Miriam as a “dark spot” in a twofold sense: On the one hand, it signifies a disturbance in the constellation’s exposure to light; on the other hand, this disturbance affirms the creative and innovative potential of the artistic imagination: “Man kann also soetwas wie eine quasi-fotografische Überbelichtung feststellen, wodurch Miriam zu einer gleißenden Erscheinung wird, während Locksley unbewusst auf die Unzulänglichkeit seiner eigenen Wahrnehmung reagiert. Seiner künstlerischen Imagination tut das jedoch keinen Abbruch.” (115)

The author’s admirable close readings of James’ early novella are characteristic of the other chapters and their insightful contributions as well, no doubt resulting from the meticulous discursive connections that the book unfolds. Accordingly, Hoffmann demonstrates that James’ travel writings – Portraits of Places (1884) and The American Scene (1904/1907) – integrate afterimages of the picturesque and the sublime as mere clichés into James’ descriptions of scenic views at tourist sites such as the Niagara Falls and the Hudson River, so that the impression of these landscapes as works of art is maintained. At the same time, James places these objectifying clichés alongside the economic exploitation of these ‘natural’ tourist attractions, thus relativizing the artificial and seemingly idyllic beauty of these sites. With his characteristic representation of landscape from manifold perspectives, James not only exposes the gap between the ideal and the real but also proposes that, because the idyllic views of Niagara Falls, or any of the other popular destinations along the Hudson River, seduce the viewers into appreciating them like artworks, these landscapes ought to be preserved as pieces of art according to state law. In doing so, James actively cultivates his readers’ experience of landscape while also attending to the historical contexts of exploitation and imperial expansion, as well as the creative potential inherent in aesthetic experiences (138–139).

Concluding the chapter on James, Hoffmann’s examination of The Ambassadors (1903/1909) sheds additional light on the discursive entanglements of nature, the visual arts, aesthetics, and literature. Furthermore, the author introduces a plethora of sub-discourses from various fields of knowledge: optics, psychology, sensory physiology, anthropology, and phenomenology. The author reads the story of Lewis Lambert Strether as the story of an increasingly fragmented epistemological process that questions the notion “einer stabilen perspektivischen und symbolischen Ordnung” (162) and, by implication, that of any coherent “Wahrnehmungsprozesse” (169) and a stable “Betrachterstandpunkt” (187). This process plays out specifically in Strether’s experience of landscapes (mostly in the form of paintings, images, and views of landscape known through the visual arts), which he perceives with an increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. As a result, his immersion into and detachment from nature requires continuous readjustment. Although this process involves the tragic component of Strether’s realization of his misapprehension of the world around him, it nevertheless opens new perspectives of and meanings about his social and natural environment (186–189).

The three chapters that make up the book’s section on the experience of landscape in the writings of the Austrian Hugo von Hofmannsthal offer nuanced readings that contribute to the scholarly discourse in exhilarating ways. By example of three early writings – the drama Der Tor und der Tod (1893), the prose text “Das Dorf im Gebirge” (1896), and the novella “Der Geiger vom Traunsee” (1889) – the book redirects the often-cited contrast between ‘live nature’ vs. ‘dead art’ in Hofmannsthal’s critique of decadence. Hoffmann contends instead that these writings suggest “Ideen der Verlebendigung im Medium der Kunst” (206), ideas that are concerned much less with the prioritizing of art over nature than with the exploration of and reflection on the dynamic and multifaceted relationships between the two. Accordingly, the author illuminates the “Wahrnehmungsleistung” (204) of Hofmannsthal’s protagonists and their vastly different perspectives, ranging from elitist aesthetes to rural farmers to urban tourists in the countryside, suggesting that art self-consciously mediates and self-reflexively explores the aesthetic and artistic experience of landscape in disillusioning yet also inspiring ways. The experience of landscape, all three of these early pieces indicate, is inevitably shaped by art historical traditions and their afterimages, as well as culturally specific regimes of vision. Even so, landscape continues to be a source of aesthetic pleasure and artistic innovation.

Focusing on “Südfranzösische Eindrücke” (1892), “Sommerreise” (1903), and Augenblicke in Griechenland (1908–1914), the study sees Hofmannsthal – like James – employing “eine Ästhetik der ‘sekundären Vision’” (234). Hofmannsthal’s secondary vision also involves cultural critique to establish a modernist ideal of travel writing that interweaves a wealth of literary, (art) historical, and cultural references from various media and discourses with descriptions of places, landscapes, and encounters. Unlike James, however, Hofmannsthal shows less skepticism vis-à-vis the viewers’ aesthetic seduction but, on the contrary, seeks to create an ideal aesthetics and poetics of modern travel writing through art. In contrast to the sentimental journey of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the Austrian defines modern travel as an experience that is characterized by its restlessness, fragmentation, and lack of charm in the face of a rich cultural tradition. It is an experience whose fleeting and banal impressions lack a suitable mode of narration, a task that his own travel writings seek to fulfill (236). Here, the rich cultural and artistic traditions of art are key to Hofmannsthal’s travel writings. Contrary to James, however, the Austrian writer synthesizes afterimages from vastly different periods and cultures with the associative, fleeting, and banal impressions of modern travel, so that as the landscape becomes alive to the beholder, a master narrative emerges, whose dreamlike, timeless quality unites the traveler/viewer and the landscape through the powerful survival of cultural and artistic traditions.

The final chapter focuses on Hofmannsthal’s “Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (1907 and posthumously). The novella’s protagonist, Lord Chandos, embodies the contemporary anxieties of cultural degeneration at the same time as he envisions art as remedy for a renewal in aesthetic experience and cultural meaning. Only art, the novella suggests, enables epiphanic moments of salvation which allow one to overcome contemporary pessimism: “Bildwahrnehmung wird so zu einer wahrhaft ‘kulturellen Potenz’” (285). The study does not stop short at this point but shows that this vision has ideological implications as well. Apart from the universalizing tendencies, Hofmannsthal’s “Briefe” and other writings hold out the promise of a cultural rootedness and sense of belonging that is comparable to, and yet unlike, Josef Nadler’s “völkisch-stammeskundliche Darstellung der deutschen Literaturgeschichte” (302). While Hofmannsthal envisions a cultural rootedness that is constitutive of national union and identity, it is not tied to specific geographical territories and ethnic or racial roots. Moreover, it emphasizes the individual’s active participation in the broader formative process of political unification and intellectual and cultural renewal without, however, elevating the shared genetic origins and national territories of a future nation state as imagined by his contemporary Nadler.

It is thanks to intricate distinctions such as these that Hoffmann’s general argument of the continued modernist engagement with nature is convincing as well as captivating. Written in German and including 19 illustrations – most of them in color – the book makes an important contribution and opens a vast field for further interdisciplinary enquiry, e. g., in the environmental humanities, aesthetics, and (comparative) modernist cultural and literary studies.