Schian, Martin
"Der deutsche Roman seit Goethe : Skizzen und Streiflichter" by Martin Schian is a collection of literary lectures written in the early 20th century. The work surveys the development of the German novel from Goethe onward, combining clear, accessible criticism with selective case studies rather than exhaustive cataloging. It aims to help educated readers judge and choose significant novels, tracing major currents such as Romanticism, the historical and realist traditions, Naturalism, and problem-oriented fiction. The opening of the work sets its scope and purpose in a preface: these are adapted public lectures meant to present literary history lucidly to a wider audience, focusing only on the German novel since Goethe and favoring depth over completeness. The first chapter argues for the cultural weight of the novel, defines it as a complex narrative that furnishes a world-picture rooted in reality, and distinguishes modes (historical, contemporary, psychological, naturalistic, and tendentious), while warning against trivial or purely sensational fiction. A concise prehistory follows, from medieval verse narratives and Volksbücher through Reformation-era bourgeois tales, Grimmelshausen’s seventeenth-century satire, and the Enlightenment, critiquing Wieland’s Agathon as philosophically didactic yet dramatically thin, before declaring Goethe the true founder of the modern German novel. The subsequent, substantial analysis reads Werther as a gripping interior study of passion, W…
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