ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the power of narrative realism as a critique of the idea and ideology of inwardness in the German-speaking world. Its theme is brought into focus by one of the most famous scenes in German realist prose. For Theodor Fontane, the truth which literary realism can communicate is essential to understanding the modern age, because it reflects in literary form the social, political, and cultural truth embodied in the experience of that age. The link between the practice of narrative realism and the idea of the self is emphasized in a different way in the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling argued that the image of the self which emerges from the European realist novel, because it is related to the romantic idea of true or authentic experience, is intrinsically oppositional.
