Vance Byrd's monograph demonstrates how the panorama helped create a modern sense of identity for the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Germany. The panorama was a popular visual medium, yet most Germans experienced it not firsthand, but in printed texts. Germans could read descriptions of panoramas, purchase guides and keys to well-known panoramas, and find panorama-like perspectives and metaphors in the literature of their time. Consequently, Byrd treats the panorama as both medium and metaphor, as both physical object and as practices that advanced a “literary pedagogy of observation.” Panoramas and their literary manifestations created an immersive world in which to debate the potentialities of modern life.

The first chapter of this book analyzes the invention of the panorama and highlights the ephemera and material objects that accompanied it: advertisements, guidebooks, keys, etc. These tools made a panorama readable, but also made it less immediate; they interrupted the sense of visual engagement and immersion with the panorama itself. Hence, the panoramic experience was not an unfettered gaze comprehending a unified compositional field, but entailed the reconciliation of that visual field with accumulated information, details, and facts gained through reading. Such readings helped audiences transform visual experience into experiences of the imagination. “The cognitive and intellectual process of producing and seeing a panorama, the attempt at unifying nature, history, and politics under the same gaze, illustrates the totalizing ambition of this mode of representation” (32), an ambition that endured in literature of the nineteenth century.

The second chapter details the treatment of the panorama in fashion journals, most prominently in F. J. Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786– 1827), and traces how the journal brought the panorama from the heterotopia of the popular fair to the bourgeois household. The journals made the panorama German (asserting its German rather than British provenance), bourgeois (linking panoramas to the bourgeois landscape garden), and domestic (panoramic images became fashionable entertainments within bourgeois households). Panoramas thus allowed Germans to envision themselves as bourgeois subjects of a potentially modern nation.

ON THE OCCASION of Theodor Fontane's two hundredth birthday, his reaction to an earlier birthday yields food for thought. Fontane describes his seventieth birthday celebration to Heinrich Jacobi on January 23, 1890:

The disparity in perception between modern Berlin and old Prussia clearly troubles Fontane; one senses that, at some level, he longs to be acknowledged by traditional Prussia, much as he may despise it, and that his image of himself as a writer does not coincide with the image that the literary world has of him. This tension, even contradiction, mirrors the enigmatic reception of Fontane in subsequent generations and particularly in the English-speaking world. Fontane is sometimes an advocate for the declining landed nobility of Prussia, sometimes the pioneer of the modernist metropolis, the champion of rural Prussia and Brandenburg but also of cosmopolitan London and the world at large. Is he regressive or progressive, an advocate of provincialism or cosmopolitanism, a traditionalist or a modernist? Fontane's staying power comes in part from his resistance to easy classification according to such binaries. He still speaks to us today because he sustains a productive tension between both the modernist idol and the compassionate, albeit ironic, chronicler of “old Prussia.”

With this volume celebrating Fontane's two hundredth birthday, we engage the tension between the modern and the traditional, the contemporary and the historical in Fontane by offering a range of contributions from the world of English-language Fontane scholarship in the twenty-first century. Balancing the competing demands of fidelity to the author's history and literary production in the nineteenth century with the interests of our own era requires recognizing both the striking similarities and the stark differences between the late-nineteenth and the early-twenty-first centuries.

THEODOR FONTANE's 1892 NOVEL Frau Jenny Treibel foregrounds conflicts within the Prussian middle class, specifically between the Besitzbürgertum (propertied middle class) and the Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class). Onto the divisions between these two subgroups Fontane projects binary oppositions such as modern and traditional, prose and poetry, and materialism and idealism, respectively. The subtitle of the novel, “Wo sich Herz zum Herzen find't” (14:3; When Heart to Heart Is Paired, 46), suggests that the novel might reconcile these polarities. Indeed, as Hugo Aust notes, resolution was an essential aesthetic criterion when Fontane reviewed literary works as a critic. Yet we do not find real resolution in this novel, for Fontane portrays these two groups as irreconcilably divided. If hearts are paired in the novel, then it occurs only within each subgroup of the Bürgertum, not across their boundaries.

What relevance might this unresolved nineteenth-century internecine class conflict have for the first half of the twenty-first century? In this novel Fontane stages a conflict with implications broader than the narrow temporal and geographical confines of nineteenth-century bourgeois Berlin society. He maps the distinctions within the Berliner bourgeoisie onto conceptions of both the nature and geography of Europe: on the one hand, a more modern, industrialized Europe, characterized by commerce and identified with Northern and Western Europe, England in particular; on the other, an ancient Europe, grounded in a rich cultural tradition and identified with Southern and Southeastern Europe, specifically Italy and Greece. The failed attempts to reconcile the differences between subgroups of the bourgeoisie reflect pessimism not only toward class reconciliation but also toward attempts at reconciliation and unity on a transnational scale. The inability to overcome the rift between Besitzbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum, between materialism and culture, suggests that, in Fontane's perspective, attempts at transnational unity such as we find in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will only perpetuate the failed attempts to reconcile these differences.

To some it might seem far-fetched to search for transnational and global issues in Fontane, who has been described as a Berlin author, a “particularist of the metropolis.” Yet Fontane was keenly aware of the world outside of Germany, not least from his time as a foreign correspondent in London (1855–59). In a recent article Roland Berbig offers a close historical reading of the first week of May during Fontane's 1858 visit to London as a demonstration in nuce of Fontane's international awareness and engagement.

German Romantic literature rests on unstable ground. For example, Friedrich Schlegel's notion of Romantic irony as a “permanente Parekbase” (permanent parabasis) denies the authority of a single vantage point. As parabasis— the Greek term for the chorus stepping out of the action of the play and addressing an ode to the audience—irony is the constant possibility of assuming another subject position, of viewing and representing the world from a different and even contradictory angle. Whether in Brentano's Godwi (1800/1801), where the narrator dies before the end of the novel and the protagonist completes the narration, or in Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots, 1797), where the audience becomes part of the play, Romantic authors challenge our notions of a stable, authoritative narrative or dramatic perspective.

Romanticism lacks stable ground not only in terms of an authoritative narrative vantage point, but also in a geological sense, as manifest in the prevalence of subterranean spaces throughout Romantic literature. The quotidian surface world of bourgeois experience rests upon and can easily sink into a honeycomb of mines, caves, and other underground spaces. In Ludwig Tieck's narrative, “Der Runenberg” (The Rune Mountain, 1804), young Christian's descent into subterranean depths represents a break with the rationality and materialism of the surface world; in E. T. A. Hoffmann's “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (The Mines of Falun, 1819), Elis Fröbom is enticed by the seductive Bergkönigin to leave the surface world only to have his dead body, perfectly preserved by “Vitriolwasser” (a sulfate solution), recovered decades later; and in Joseph von Eichendorff's “Das Marmorbild” (The Marble Statue, 1819), young Florio must resist the enticements of a magical erotic castle (Venusberg) that emerges from subterranean realms on occasion to tempt and entrap young artists like himself.

Perhaps best known among Romantic ventures into the subterranean world, however, are Novalis's frequent representations of such spaces. One thinks of the Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), where the poet longs to venture “Hinunter in der Erde Schoß, / Weg aus des Lichtes Reichen” (Down into the Earth's womb, / Away from Light's kingdom”), or on the numerous subterranean settings in the novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen), whether in the underground chambers that hide the princess in the Atlantis fairy tale, the visit to the caves with the old miner, or Fabel's journey to the underworld in Klingsohr's fairy tale.

THE FIELD OF GERMAN STUDIES in the twenty-first century has been shaped in no small measure by the spatial or topographical turn in the social sciences and humanities. Two important scholarly anthologies edited on either side of the Atlantic indicate the breadth of this critical idiom: Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme; and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. Fittingly, in organizing these collections, the respective editors have chosen to apply models associated with the critical turn in question. Thus, the four sections of Böhme's anthology are headed “Representations of Discursive Spaces,” “Spaces of Literature,” “Literary Spaces,” and “Borders and the Foreign,” while the four sections of Fisher and Mennel's collection bear the headings “Mapping Spaces,” “Spaces of the Urban,” “Spaces of Encounter,” and “Visualized Space.” In their overall organization, these two milestone anthologies thus studiously avoid what Böhme terms “classical systems of order, for instance according to periods” (IX). In this special section of the Goethe Yearbook devoted to the poetics of space in the Goethezeit, we hope to build on the work of these ground-breaking anthologies, while questioning an approach that foregrounds the category of space at the expense of that of period—whether understood in the more traditional sense of the Age of Goethe, or Reinhart Koselleck's notion of the Sattelzeit, or the temporal marker “around 1800.”

Within the framework of the spatial turn, the relegation of period to “a secondary role” (Böhme IX) is understandable. Indeed, the turn to an analysis of space as a fundamental social category arose precisely as a reaction to, and critique of, historicism, in particular the Marxian historical dialectic. As Edward Soja writes in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, “The critical hermeneutic is still enveloped in a temporal master-narrative, in a historical but not yet comparably geographical imagination.” Building on twentieth-century social thinkers (particularly Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre), Soja and other contemporary theoretical geographers (such as Derek Gregory and David Harvey) have challenged “the hoary traditions of a space-blinkered historicism” and have helped effect “a far-reaching spatialization of the critical imagination” (Soja 11).

In this ambitious monograph, Mattias Pirholt argues against those who find in German Romanticism a wholesale refutation of mimetic aesthetics. He proposes instead that Romantics reinterpreted ideas from eighteenth-century debates on representation, such as the productivity of both the artist and nature and the conception of art as a formation of alternative and ideal worlds. The Romantic work combines both mimetic and self-reflective practices; it reproduces mimesis metapoetically as a representation of representation and reflects on the very conditions of representation. As such, Romantic mimesis is inherently metamimesis, a transcendental investigation into the relationship between life and poetry.

The monograph has five main chapters. The first is a theoretical and historical introduction to the Romantic period, the concept of mimesis, and the genre of the novel. In Romanticism, mimesis represents poiesis. That is, it imitates not a static object but a creative process that strives for the unattainable. In this context, the novel is the mimetic genre par excellence due to its preoccupation with life in all its aspects. In striving for the absolute, the metamimetically self-reflec tive novel contains and reflects all forms of poetic expression. Its focus on the production of life transforms questions of aesthetics into questions of social relations and the form of society.

In the following chapters Pirholt analyzes four influential novels written around 1800. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the starting point, both as irritation and inspiration, for the metamimetic novels of Romanticism. In Goethe's novel Pirholt finds two modes of representation—narration and dialogue— which mirror Plato's distinction between diegesis and mimesis. Goethe is unable to mend the rupture between these two modes except with a new kind of image, one that is indicated but never fully realized in the novel: the symbol. In the image and the symbol, one finds representation of the unity that supports and precedes difference. For Goethe, representational difference constitutes both a point of departure for the protagonist's life story and a state to be overcome.

In subsequent chapters Pirholt focuses on Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Clemens Brentano's Godwi, reading each as a metamimetic response to the problem that Goethe posed. In Schlegel's text, repetition constitutes the principal aesthetic structure, and in this regard, the novel is intrinsically mimetic.