Jeffrey L. Sammons

The shifting fortunes of Wilhelm Raabe : a history of criticism as a cautionary tale

Wilhem Raabe (1831-1910), the most gifted German novelist between Goethe and Fontane, was a kind of German Victorian writer, a counterpart to Dickens and Thackeray, by whom he was profoundly influenced. The reassessment and upgrading of his literary achievement has been one of the liveliest topics of German literary scholarship - much influenced by British and American contributions - of the last thirty years. This process has involved a rescue from a cult of idolatry that grew up around his death and evolved into a Nazi allegiance that for a time sank his reputation.

Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America

This study of German fiction about America in the 19th century concentrates in detail on three writers: Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl, 1793-1864), an escaped Moravian monk who came to New Orleans in 1823 and during the 1830s and 1840s wrote the first major German novels about the United States; Friedrich Gerstacker (1816-1872), who, among his many experiences in America as a young man, lived as a backwoodsman in Arkansas and who later produced a large body of fiction, travel reportage and emigration advice; and Karl May (1842-1912), who, though he knew nothing about America beyond what he could read in books such as those by Sealsfield and Gerstacker, wrote famous adventure storties set in an imginary West and became the best-selling writer in the German language, whose sales by now have exceeded 100 million volumes. Sammons interweaves his discussion of these writers with excurses into the emergence of the German Western and anti-Americanism in German fiction.