Aimed primarily at English-speaking undergraduate students of German literature, but also with graduate students and a general readership in mind, this book deals with the literary landscapes in Theodor Fontane's best known novels - 'Schach von Wuthenow' (1882), 'Irrungen, Wirrungen' (1888), and 'Effi Briest' (1895). It is an illuminating introduction to one of Europe's finest novelists. "It is an excellent idea to guide readers through the novels by way of focusing on the landscapes. James Bade brings an enormous amount of material into the discussion and is always detailed and precise. The book reads very well and enriches the Fontane literature.--publisher website.

What happens when fashionable forms of unserious speech prove to be contagious, when they adulterate and weaken communicative spheres that rely on honesty, trust, and sincerity? Demonstrating how the tension between irony and avowal constitutes a central conflict in Fontane's works, this book argues that his best-known society novels play out a struggle between the incompatible demands of these two modes of speaking. Read in this light, the novels identify an irreconcilable discrepancy between word and deed as both the root of emotional discord and the proximate cause of historical and political upheaval. Given the alarm since 2016 over unreliability, falsehood, and indifference to truth, it is now easier to perceive in Fontane's novels a profound concern about language that is not sincere and not meant to be taken literally. For Fontane, irony exemplifies a discrepancy between language and meaning, a loosening of the ethical bond between words and the things to which they refer. His novels investigate the extent to which human relationships can continue to function in the face of pervasive irony and the erosion of language's credibility. Although Fontane is widely regarded as an ironic writer, Tucker's analyses reveal a critical distance between his works and the prospect of irony as a dominant idiom. Revisiting Fontane's novels in a post-truth age brings the conflict between irony and avowal into sharper relief and makes legible the stakes and contours of our own post-truth condition.

In the mid-1880s, the Realist author and Anglophile Theodor Fontane observed:nowhere is so much translation done as in Germany. Characterizing Germany as a special locus of literary translation and reception, Fontane contests a prejudice which has since become a significant problem for nineteenth-century German studies, namely the frequent assessment of the epoch as narrowly national. The present collection of essays by thirteen eminent literary scholars and historians is intended to correct this prejudice: it demonstrates that literary life and production in the nineteenth century were governed by complex networks of intercultural exchange, influence and translation, and it does justice to this complexity through its range of complementary critical approaches, focussing on Fontane, Anglo-German relations, translation, and European reception. In so doing, this book not only offers a nuanced appreciation of literary production and reception in the nineteenth century, but also demonstrates the continued relevance of that period for Germanists today.

It has been argued that the history of landscape and of gardens has been marginalized from the mainstream of art history and visual studies because of a lack of engagement with the theories, methods and concepts of these disciplines. This book explores possible ways out of this impasse in such a way that landscape studies would become pivotal through its theoretical advances, since landscape studies would challenge the underlying assumptions of traditional phenomenological theory. Thus the history and theory of twentieth-century landscape might not only once again share concepts and methods with contemporary art and design history, but might in turn influence them. A complementary sequel to Relating Architecture to Landscape, this volume of essays explores further areas of interest and discussion in the landscape/architecture debate and offers contributions from a team of well-known researchers, teachers and writers. The choice of topics is wide-ranging and features case studies of modern and contemporary schemes from the USA, Far East and Australasia.

The novels of Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), Germany's most important Realist, have long been appreciated for the symbolism of their represented worlds. In this study, Michael White examines the significance of space and spatial experience across Fontane's oeuvre, providing analyses of non-fiction prose and less well-known novels, alongside major works and poetry. The study reveals not only a complex and varied spatial symbolism, but also that space itself is a thematic concern in Fontane's writing. His texts portray human beings' relationships with their worlds, and how and to what end they invest their environment with meaning. Fontane's novels and travel writings emerge as profoundly reflexive discourses on art and its function for the individual. Michael J. White completed his Ph.D. at St Andrews and now teaches German at the Institut de la formation des maîtres, Université d'Artois.