Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts

Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts

Mörike, Eduard
Whitinger, Raleigh
Whitinger, Raleigh

Hardcover

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, Book 1

Classic FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 1571133127
ISBN13: 9781571133120
Publisher: Camden House Inc
Published: Mar 1 2005
Pages: 334
Weight: 1.48
Height: 1.17 Width: 6.28 Depth: 9.28
Language: English
When students and critics of the novel speak of German artist-novels and Bildungsromane, they mention works long available in translation: by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, Grass, and others. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled Maler Nolten: Novelle in Zwei Teilen (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood, and has never been translated into English until now. This despite its obvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity, features that have recently begun to be realized by scholarship. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which Mörike's narrator is subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating, finally, is the mysterious trail of the Grenzgänger, or border-line characters, such as the Gypsy Elisabeth, the queer Wispel, the duplicitous actor Larkens, and the mysterious old Hofrat, with their hints at the dimension of Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves that seems to threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful mastery. Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages, University of Alberta.

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