Gottfried Kellers Moderne
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Edited by:
Frauke Berndt
Topics
Keller not only reinterpreted literary genres like the legend but, with the bildungsroman and the novella, also shaped the forms that psychologically gauge the modern subject. These contributions explore Keller’s texts as evidence of a "threshold narratology," which eludes epochal attributions. Keller’s narrative works are thus revealed as a laboratory of transitory poetics.
As an author and painter, Gottfried Keller deliberately experimented with different media and their forms – with genres from both literature and the fine arts. The objective of this volume is to trace the various intermedial and transmedial connections in Keller’s oeuvre, focusing on the processes of literary and social institutionalization that accompanied his experiments with form and genre.
This volume takes Gottfried Keller’s century seriously as the century of industrialization, imperialism, and colonialism. Companies of international mercenaries, colonial adventures, transcontinental arranged marriages, and exotic imaginary spaces at the heart of Europe: Keller’s texts create territories, orders, and circulations with their worlds, continuously renegotiating the borders between "ownness" and "strangeness."
