ABSTRACT
The preponderance of Raabe's pre-1871 fiction — short stories, novellas, and novels — was set in key eras of Germany's tumultuous past: in particular, the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the Seven Years War. Wilhelm Raabe's national idealism was more pronounced during the early stages of his literary career, the Wolfenbüttel and Stuttgart periods, those years preceding German unification. Contemporary cultural studies — history and literary history — agree that the long nineteenth century was devoted to the project of nation-building. Geoff Eley points out that in the case of Germany 'populations were being reshaped within old territorial states in a new and distinctively "national" manner'. The notion of gender, intended to separate analytically the physical body from the social body, has become an increasingly vexed and complex concept. The role of the women in this text raises issues of gender and nation-building, as well as of ethnicity and nation-building.
