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Landscape And Change In Three Novels By Theodor Fontane, Jane Ellen Speerstra

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis traces and explicates the changes in Theodor Fontane's landscape depiction in the years 1887- 1892. I examine his novels Cecile (1887), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), and unwiederbringlich (1892). I show that Fontane, as though discarding a relic of the Romantic past, used increasingly less landscape in his narratives. He focused on the actions and conversation of his characters, and on their immediate surroundings. When these surroundings were urban, they tended to disappear. The progressive minimalization of landscape, and of cityscape in particular, foreshadowed the appearance in German literature of twentieth-century man: man alienated from nature in cities, and less …