Bavarian dialect literature

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Bavarian dialect literature in the broader regional sense includes all literature that is written in a Bavarian dialect. This includes works by authors from Old Bavaria , Austria and South Tyrol through to the Bavarian language islands in Italy, Romania and South America. In the diachronic sense, one speaks of dialect literature only from the late baroque period , i.e. from around the year 1750, since there was previously no uniform German standard language and the difference between written dialect and a particularly dialectically colored Upper German writing language was fluent, as was the case with the old German. Viennese folk theater pieces by Joseph Anton Stranitzky .

Demarcation

Not counting in Bavarian dialect literature, however, are some of the prominent local poets from the region, who often wrote idyllically about the life of farmers, lumberjacks, dairymen, poachers and mountaineers or the rural customs in Bavaria and Austria, but whose works are written in full are written in standard German . These include the Upper Austrian Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), the Salzburg Karl Heinrich Waggerl (1897–1973), the Lower Styrian Ottokar Kernstock (1848–1928) and the South Tyrolean Luis Trenker (1892–1990). Furthermore, with many authors, especially of the 19th and early 20th centuries, only a few works are actually written in dialect, for example with the playwrights often only parts of the dialogues, while the play as a whole was written in standard German. For example, there are very few texts by Ludwig Thoma and Peter Rosegger that are consistently written in dialect.

A modern literary phenomenon are texts that use dialectal idioms and vocabulary as well as slang grammar, for example through the consistent use of the perfect tense instead of the past tense , but the spelling remains completely high-level. Readers with dialect competence can translate such texts directly into the dialect while reading and often do not have the conscious impression of having read a standard-language text. A prominent representative of this genre in Austria is the crime novelist Wolf Haas , or the interwar playwright Jura Soyfer, often referred to as the " Austrian Bert Brecht " . The commercial advantage of these works is that readers from different Bavarian dialect regions can read the text in their head like their own dialect and thus a wider audience can be reached than, for example, with an actual dialect work in, for example, Viennese, Tyrolean or Upper Bavarian.

Dialect authors

The following is a list of the most famous Bavarian-speaking dialect authors, sorted by era and dialect region:

Late baroque

Ignatz Anton Weiser, 1701–1785
Franz Stelzhamer, 1802–1874
Franz von Kobell, 1803–1882
Elise Beck around 1900
Ludwig Thoma, 1867–1921
HC Artmann, 1921-2000
Willi Resetarits, * 1948

enlightenment

romance

Late 19th century

Early 20th century

post war period

Contemporary literature