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The Waiting Water
Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism
Alexander Sorenson (Author)
9781501777097
Hardback, published 15 September 2024
282 pages, 3 b&w halftones - 3 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.907 kg
The Waiting Water addresses one of the most recurrent and troubling motifs in German Realist literature—death by drowning. Characters find themselves before bodies of water, presented with the familiar realm above the surface and the unobservable, uncanny domain beneath it. With somber regularity, they then disappear into the depths. Alexander Sorenson explores the role that these hidden deaths in water play within a literary movement that set out precisely to reveal universal truths about human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolve around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism—order and sacrifice. Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs, The Waiting Water shows that the pervasive symbolism of drowning scenes in German Realism, which typically occur in zones of narrative invisibility on the social periphery, reveals the extent to which realist narrative uses the natural environment to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.
Introduction: Between the Surface and the Depths
1. Water and Stone: The End of Life and Sacrifice inGoethe's Elective Affinities and Ebner-Eschenbach'sBeyond Atonement
2. The Wide Sea of Light: Hidden Law and Works ofLove in Stifter's Early Writing
3. Flumen Publicum: The Imitation of Right and theRecognition of Rite in Keller's A Village Romeo and Juliet
4. A Faint Wake: Atonement and Afterward in Storm'sLate Works
Epilogue: Ophelia and the Boatman