ABSTRACT
In Gottfried Keller's Der grune Heinrich the hero does not abandon the pretensions of an undisciplined subjectivity only to internalize the external imperatives of the bourgeois world. Whilst the leading philosophical discourses of mid-nineteenth-century Germany give a key role to aesthetic experience in the articulation of human subjectivity they neither address the specific capacities of the narrative realist form nor — in what they say about that form — anticipate the idea of the self which these two novels communicate. Friedrich Nietzsche's radical questioning of the concept of 'truth' in both its philosophical and aesthetic modes has crucial implications for the interpretation of his work. At first sight, this would seem to make Nietzsche's thought especially relevant to the novel, especially the narrative of self-cultivation and psychological development which is characteristic of the German Bildungsroman tradition. Nietzsche's cultural and intellectual influence on Wilhelmine Germany was certainly massive.
