ABSTRACT
The essays assembled in this book are concerned with German literature in the period which, outside Germany, saw the efflorescence of European realism. This period spans the decades between Goethe’s death in 1832 and the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. However, it seemed proper to extend it so as to include some of the writings of Theodor Fontane, the only major realist on the German scene, whose fiction was written between 1878 and his death in 1898, and the last novels of Wilhelm Raabe, written in the early 1890s; and I conclude with an account of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, completed in 1872, which contains both a critique of Nietzsche’s own age and intimations of the age to come.
