Disruptive Organizers: Wild children in German realism (1850-1900)
Date
2020-05
Author
Advisors
Downing, Eric
von Bernuth, Ruth
Engelstein, Stefani
Layne, Priscilla
Norberg, Jakob
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the intersection of childhood and wildness within the literary
movement of German realism. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction
of
mandatory education and the consolidation of the middle-class family, both of which
established
childhood as a distinct phase. The literary movement of German realism emerged at
the same
time, with a focus on representing ordinary life and experiences with a particular
concentration
on bourgeois values and norms.. But many children in the works of this movement prove
more
fantastical than realistic, more extraordinary than ordinary, and more deviant than
safely
bourgeois. This study therefore examines how representations of wild children interact
with the
aesthetics of the average within German realism. Ultimately, this dissertation has
two main
points: First, depictions of wild children should not be read solely as a means of
celebrating the
average, middle class reality of the nineteenth-century through a strategy of the
literary
containment of wild children. Rather, the wild child initiates a redemptive transformation
of
reality and is a means for introducing that which would otherwise escape representation
in realist
prose fiction. Second, the frequent appearance of wild children within the literary
movement of
German realism serves as a rhetorical strategy to depict a changing nineteenth-century
reality
with regard to education, family, gender, nation and art, as well as a means to question
the
success of these structures. In order to make these arguments, this dissertation engages
with four
types of wild children: literary descendants of Goethe’s Mignon, fairytale children,
differently
abled children associated with the figure of Kaspar Hauser, and criminal children.
It also
considers the intersection of gender and wildness and the ways in which the language
of
wildness, culture and civilization have been used in Western literary traditions,
particularly in a
late-nineteenth-century German context.
Type
DissertationPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20632Citation
Reif, Margaret (2020). Disruptive Organizers: Wild children in German realism (1850-1900). Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20632.Collections
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