Peasant novel
The farmer's novel or the farmer's story is a traditional form of folk epic, which is characterized by the literary representation of peasant life.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish it from other forms of popular epic (such as village history ).
German-language literature
So-called peasant poetry has existed since the 13th century , for example from the pen of Wernher the Gartenaere (like his verse novella Meier Helmbrecht ). Initially, the authors of this genre hardly came from the peasant milieu, as a higher level of writing ability was not common in this group. From the 18th century, the village history and the village novel developed from a realistic representation of agricultural life. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the peasant novel was an extremely popular component of naturalism and local art with the readership. As such, it partially exaggerated the world of the peasants in a mythical way, later it was sometimes also infused with blood-and-soil and racial ideological ideas by the authors, for which it was particularly suitable and whereby National Socialism in particular was able to make use of the popular genre. A very successful peasant novel after 1945 was Anna Wimschneider's autobiographical work Herbstmilch .
Literatures of other countries
Peasant novels by authors such as Knut Hamsun , Olav Duun and Martin Andersen Nexø were given special status in the Scandinavian-speaking area. Flemish, Polish, Russian and French literature also contain important peasant novels.
literature
- Peter Zimmermann: The farmer's novel. 1975
- Günter Helmes : "Some are happy about the rain, they still have grain from last year, they don't need any." Country life, agriculture and capitalism in Adam Scharrer's farmer's novel Moles (1933). With introductory references to Anna Seghers' Der Kopflohn (1933) In: Jahrbuch zur Kultur und Literatur der Weimarer Republik, Vol. 15, 2011/12, pp. 147–176.