A Companion to the Works of Adalbert Stifter

Presents Stifter’s multi-faceted oeuvre to both a German Studies and non-specialized Anglophone audience, showing today’s readers the relevance of its concerns.

The canonical nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), long considered a staid stylist - if not mannerist - and a conservative-bourgeois apologist, has recently become the subject of more vibrant literary-theoretical approaches. While Stifter is primarily known for his fictional prose, including two lengthy novels (Der Nachsommer [Indian Summer] and Witiko) and numerous novella-length narratives, he also wrote dozens of cultural-political and scientific essays. Moreover, his professional activity in the Austrian school system and his diverse publications in the realm of pedagogy not only shed interpretive light on his literary production but also inform enduring debates on education reform and the intellectual-historical question of Bildung. This volume covers a wide range of texts and topics within Stifter’s oeuvre. With respect to literary-historical coverage, it extends from his earliest tale Der Condor (The Condor, 1840) to his posthumously published chronicle Aus dem bairischen Walde (From the Bavarian Forest, 1868); in terms of genre, it embraces his novels and novellas, his essayistic work, and even his landscape paintings; finally, it pursues a host of deeper problems and thematic strands that permeate his texts and make them relevant to readers today. These include (neo-)conservatism, social unrest, law and order, ecology, climatology, bioregionalism, and the Anthropocene.