Picturesque Mediations: Adalbert Stifter, Washington Irving, and the Transfiguration of the Mundane

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the Germanophone realist Adalbert Stifter's reception of Washington Irving. Pushing against the traditional narrative of German realism's apolitical provinciality, it argues that media technologies from the British picturesque tradition, transmitted by way of Irving, aided Stifter in obscuring his cosmopolitan and colonialist ideologies. Picturesque observational practices, which emphasized the imaginative and artistic “improvement” of reality, overlap considerably with German realist techniques of transfiguration, and Irving's and Stifter's texts both emphasize the epiphanic experience of life and art, of reality and its mediation. Linking the epistemological dimensions of both periods to early statistical thought and illustrating how the authors’ preferred genres of the sketch and study pull from the same artistic and media-historical discourse, the essay uncovers striking continuities between the Germanophone and American literary contexts, recasting German realism as fully enmeshed within the global context it seemingly disavows.