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
Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America

Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America

Sammons, Jeffrey L.

Paperback

Series: University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages a, Book 121

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1469656701
ISBN13: 9781469656700
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: May 1 2020
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
This study of German fiction about America in the nineteenth century concentrates in detail on three writers: Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl, 1793-1864), an escaped Moravian monk who came to New Orleans in 1823 and wrote the first major German novels about the United States; Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816-1872), who, among his many experiences in America as a young man, lived as a backwoodsman in Arkansas and who later produced a large body of fiction, travel reportage, and emigration advice; and Karl May (1842-1912), who, though he knew nothing about America beyond what he could read in books, wrote famous adventure stories set in an imaginary West and became the best-selling writer in the German language.

Sammons provides biographies of the authors and discusses how each differs in their mimetic and ideological approach. He pays particular attention to how the authors address issues of race, gender and politics in the United States. Sammons interweaves his discussion of these three writers with excurses into the emergence of the German Western and anti-Americanism in German fiction.

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