Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Richards, Anna

Titel

Forgetting the Dead in Gellert's Leben der Schwedischen Gräfin von G (1747/8)

Ist Teil von

• Oxford German studies, 2006-09, Vol.35 (2), p.165-175

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Death in Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G (1747/48), an early German sentimental novel, is not portrayed in excessively sentimental terms. Neither is it the cornerstone for a rational bourgeois social order in which characters renounce their desires, as has been argued. On the contrary, death is conspicuous in the novel by its lack of resonance. Early eighteenth-century philosophers such as Georg Friedrich Meier used mourning to illustrate the power of the mind to reproduce, recognize, and respond emotionally to images from the past, but Gellert does not integrate psychological ideas about memory and the imagination into his work to any great extent. Instead, his novel is characterized by an aesthetics of presence which distinguishes it from later sentimental works.