Gallant novel
The terminology of the gallant novel goes back on the one hand to language usage in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In Western Europe, novels were referred to as gallant if they showed a certain audience demand (addressed the “gallant world”), offered “gallant” interactions (preferably “love intrigues”) or were written in a “gallant style”. Occasionally, erotic literature was euphemistically paraphrased as the periphrase "gallant" , as eroticism was often discussed in the gallant novel. The label of gallantry was left to taste judgments in all these points, the aspects of content, style, and dealing with the audience formed a close connection.
The discussion about the gallant novel in the literary studies of the 20th century was reoriented, especially in Romance and German studies. This has above all to do with the fact that gallant novels were discussed in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in Germany, with a view to the French novel and French fashions. The main questions here were whether the gallant novel is an epoch-making type in its own right and how it positioned itself in this case in relation to the baroque novel and the novel of the Enlightenment.
Research positions
More than the German discussion, the Romance style remained devoted to a variant of the courtly-heroic baroque novel, as it was written in the mid-17th century by authors such as Madeleine de Scudéry .
Germanistic research developed out of the observation that a discussion of gallant novels in Germany only began in the 1680s. The fundamental question here was why it became this - epochal? - Delay came. The research was devoted to it from different perspectives, which had in common that they assumed a production gap between 1680 and 1730. Until the 1930s, the research concentrated on the novels of August Bohse alias Talander, with which the discussion of gallant novels arose in the 1680s, but there has been a shift in focus here in recent decades. It goes back above all to the work of Herbert Singer, which at the beginning of the 1960s focused on the presumed peak of the epoch. It was not until Christian Friedrich Hunold's Adalie (1702), according to Singer, that the gallant novel found its exemplary expression. The type of construction that Singer worked out stood, according to the final interpretation, similarly between the Baroque and the Enlightenment as the early Rococo did in art history. Singer spoke of the “Rococo comedy novel ”, a form of the heroic baroque novel with French influences that did not show any transition into the Enlightenment novel, which was adopted by German authors in the 1740s with Samuel Richardson's Pamela .
The localization of epochs was questioned in its approach in 1983 by Rolf Grimminger in Hanser's Social History of German Literature, following on from John A. McCarthy (1985) and Bernhard Fischer (1989). If the criteria were set differently than Singer had done, aspects of their own could be shown that led to the investigation.
Research, which has turned to the gallant novel since 2001, has questioned the previous search for the typical gallant novel and its epochal construction. The work of Olaf Simons argued with the European book market. The question here was why in some cases the same novels that were discussed in English as “novels” versus “romances” were associated in Germany with a fashion of the gallant; the gallant's discussion was given its own weight over the texts on the basis of which one discussed. The works of Florian Gelzer were more dedicated to the qualities of the gallant, which can be demonstrated in titles of very different genres and narrative patterns. Gelzer extended the period up to Christoph Martin Wieland .
The research volumes, which in 2001 and 2004 raised the question of the Germanic epoch definition for the phases 1680 and 1730, only dealt with the gallant novel in passing, but focused on the formulation of theories of the epoch change, among which the gallant novel between baroque and Enlightenment for upheavals, sliding transitions or a specific lack of orientation should be examined.
Aspects of definition in the 17th and 18th centuries
Up until the early 18th century, gallant novels were understood to be neither novels of a certain genre nor the novel of the current “gallant” epoch. True, there is an awareness that the gallant is in fashion. Historical self-localizations, however, take place in the middle of the 18th century with a view to the century or “Säkulum” to be named, as well as in an intellectual exchange of blows with a view to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes . You see yourself positioned here compared to the Middle Ages and antiquity in the modern age.
The classification of novels as "gallant" happens in the late 17th and early 18th centuries mainly in the context of taste judgments. On the other hand, it was no less possible in German into the early 18th century to count the novel as a whole among the gallant writings. The demarcation is made here from academic, religious journalism on the one hand and from uneducated reading on the other. In French one speaks of the “belles lettres” as the larger text area of all elegant, fashionable fonts. In German, “galante Wissenschafften” is the translation for “belles lettres” until the 1720s. In English one speaks of "polite literature" and creates within this area a special one of the "Writers of Gallantry", which includes novelists. The presence of love stories is the key definition criterion here.
The taste judgment “gallant” covers a multitude of aspects: subject, interaction with the audience, style that require each other on closer inspection.
The judgment “gallant” is primarily about the effect of the text, the comfort it achieves in the eyes of the beholder and the specific audacity of the courageous, gallant interaction that the gallant writers reveal to the audience lay. The structures of judgment at this point differ considerably from the Germanistic ones, which in the 20th century tried to open up a generic typology of the gallant novel.
Subjects and genres of the gallant novel
Most of the novels designated as "gallant" in the 17th and 18th centuries feature love stories. In individual cases, however, a career as a player or soldier can be an equally gallant subject. The decisive factor is the distance from the life presented. The gallant hero has to distinguish himself as a “lively head”, show a “tidy Humeur” and ultimately remain unaffected by disasters. He can expose himself to ridicule like satirical (picaresque) heroes, but then has to regain levity and sovereignty in view of his own life after the reported mishap. You laugh together with the gallant hero from a distance, not at him as a person who cannot put his own situation into perspective. The subject and the conduite are closely related at this point. Under these premises, Robinson Crusoe (1719) did not allow himself to be perceived as a gallant novel, since the hero lacks fun in society and humorous distance from himself. For Crusoe, one's own story of suffering gains aspects of agonizing, self-tormenting religious self-exploration - an option that goes beyond all gallant dealings with the audience and life. Gallant novels are therefore not found in all genres of the market. They are rare where heroes cannot gain education and training in their own conduite .
Heroically gallant novels
The first assignments of the word “gallant” can be found in the 17th century in view of the heroic novels that follow Amadís at a more critical distance. The concentration on a high-ranking main hero and his love as well as his heroic handling of difficulties is gallant. The Amadís already offered a focus on love dialogues, with which he distinguished himself from the medieval novel. The offer of gallant dialogues, the integration of gallant letters and compliments became an essential criterion for “gallant” novels in the middle of the 17th century.
The novels, which increasingly appreciated the word in the course of the 17th century, come from France and emphasize the conduite, polite intercourse between the sexes. The relocation of actions from the Middle Ages to antiquity and into Asian empires offer creative freedom here (see the separate keyword Asian novel ). With the relocations comes a denial of the great heroism of hard-hitting knights. The heroes of the antiquated heroic novels tend to follow the patterns of Greek and Roman historiography. The geographical and historical distancing is also regularly balanced by a new game with the present. The most gallant authors write romaneses with the help of Greek and Roman historians and play current stories.
Reception instructions in handbooks of gallant conduite exhort the readers to excerpt the dialogues of these novels , to observe their reflections on political maxims, to learn from them character analyzes.
Scandalous modern gallant novels
If the heroically gallant novels have already developed their own potentially scandalous way of dealing with the public, this is more open in the field of political memoirs and letter collections, which in the second half of the 17th century were brought to the international market primarily by French authors - the Dutch market, which has been withdrawn from French censorship, is becoming increasingly important. The more novel-like production stands by the side of memoirs and journalistic works, which only temporarily sprinkle scandalous stories, as one should read about the example, not about the scandalous fact that what is reported here should be true.
The heroes of the more novel-like histories can look back on the adventures of their own political or military life as first-person narrators and playfully deal with the style of good novels. Persiflage of the gallant heroic novel allowed a new production of gallant conduite at the end of the 17th century. Typical are titles like the anonymous La Guerre D'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707), the author of which reports how he gained insights into the political and military events of the last three decades as an agent of the French king. Political history and private love affairs are consistently mixed up in the autobiographical report. A whole complex of aspects is gallantly worked out. The hero treats his audience nonchalantly: It cannot decide whether he is speaking the truth, but readers who share more life experience and attitude with him can appreciate that more is true than is generally thought and experienced - about that The gallant hero is only partly concerned about the judgment of the readers, he knows that readers with taste are on his side in advance. In the love stories, the gallant hero does not enter into any further ties. The women who deal with him play with him and do not seek tragic affairs. He encounters them in constant joke and in tandem. In politics as well as in his private life, he enjoys moments of skillful deception. Where the press certifies great war heroes gallant conduits, he sees the game of propaganda with the public more clearly than immense, but admirably well-made fraud - here, too, suffering from the situation is not the consequence. Gallantry develops with the freedom in your own thinking and acting, with the "lively Humeur" and the "tidy head" who saves himself skillfully every now and then. The portrait that the author gives of himself in the book is symptomatic - not via a frontispiece, but in a “curieuser” scene in which he accidentally sets parts of his manuscript on fire while writing in a hotel bed. (There is a matching copperplate engraving in the richly illustrated German edition.)
Memoir-like novels or fictional-like memoirs of this type are juxtaposed with titles that offer no narrative, journalistically advance in collections of stories and letters. Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and Anne-Marguerite Petit DuNoyer wrote important gallant titles related to the novel . The still clearly gallant novels of Aphra Behn are influenced by her books, such as the titles Delarivier Manley , which at the beginning of the 18th century moved away from the tone of the gallant, especially female, understanding of weaknesses, especially male politicians, and demanded civic responsibility.
Galant is the scandalous view of love affairs among politically high-ranking protagonists in public life in all of the titles to be summarized here. Second, gallant is the generosity of the authors, who report with a proven understanding of all the weaknesses of their heroes - with a view to readers who should judge just as gallantly (but probably will not judge). Thirdly, the way in which the public is dealt with is gallant: the authors are ostentatiously not interested in the scandal, they exchange all names, do not want to harm anyone, at best they hope that readers who are just as uninterested in the scandal as they are themselves will appreciate the examples. Here a stencil of gallant generosity is used to create precisely the scandals that have been identified. Fourthly, what is gallant about these books is that they are mainly written by women who are treated with gallant respect for male voices in the same market.
From the gallant books of public history, a more private production split off at the beginning of the 18th century, which appears wherever fashionable authors can publish protected under the usual gallant pseudonyms. The big cities of London, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Paris offer protection of anonymity here. In the German university cities, a similar anonymity is achieved for student authors who use them for their own production of student novels. They are a direct counterpart to the small private novels that are being presented in London at the same time by anonymous female voices.
The production of scandalous gallant novels came under attack from the new bourgeois journals in the course of the 18th century. At the same time that virtuous counter-designs such as Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) emerged, the gallant was pushed into a separate market of pornography and libertine autobiography. The Memoires Giacomo Casanova's " Histoire de ma vie " exhibit at the end of the 18th century still essential qualities gallant novels of the early 18th century. In the market of trivial literature, the gallant novel lives on with genres such as that of the James Bond novels and films, which until well into the early 21st century typically merged love stories with no deeper responsibilities with political missions.
Novels by strong women
In the larger overview of the production of gallant novels, a separate treatment of female protagonists is striking. It has only in part to do with the fact that women writers set the tone here. The heroines typical of gallant novels can be found in both male and female authors. Noteworthy here are women who slip into men's clothes and act as men - to defend their lives, to avenge dead lovers, to escape attacks by enemies. In addition, there are women who remain recognizable as such, but who also kill men if necessary - as kidnapping victims, in cold blood and without any signs of female sensitivity ascribed to them.
If one sees these novels as part of a gallant way of dealing with the female audience, then they allow them to identify with women who are entirely equal to men. If you look at it in a more market-specific way, readers are served with escapist role changes. The reform of the novel market, which began in the 1740s, specifically created "sensitive", suffering, weak heroines as counter-models.
Gallant compositions
Works of the 20th century tried to assign the gallant novel its own compositional pattern, with which it could be differentiated from the novel of the Baroque and that of the Enlightenment. The central work of this line of research was written by Herbert Singer in 1963. If you followed her, Christian Friedrich Hunold's Amiable Adalie (1702) became typical of the gallant novel - a novel that remained committed to the construction scheme of the heroic baroque and with this went back to the late antique novel Heliodors .
In contrast, research over the past thirty years pointed to the variety of titles that were judged to be “gallant” in the 17th and 18th centuries, and which for the most part distanced themselves from the construction scheme of the heroic great novel. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Galant repeatedly judged the freedom to deal with the novel as a genre, the orientation towards the novella, the integration of individual stories instead of adventures, the play with intrigues, the inclusion of letters, songs, opera texts , the loosening up of the text by maxims. The discussion about the gallant novel touches on the simultaneous English and French appreciation of the "novel", the "petit histoire" as an alternative genre, as well as the discovery of the stories from the Arabian Nights as the first large non-European collection of stories.
Gallant style
The gallant style is expected to be unstable between the 1640s and 1730s. However, the direction remains the same. Bombast is consistently rated negatively. Terms like esprit and charm refer to a transition from ideals of Italian rhetorically fluffy epic to ideals of French prose. The change in fashion becomes tangible with the advent of French foreign words in German texts. In the German Fraktur French parts of the word are set in Antiqua. Especially when it comes to the use of linguistic images, there was a change in style around 1700, which made even older authors such as August Bohse alias Talander outdated in German around the early 18th century. The rules that Benjamin Neukirch sets for gallantry in letters reappear in the novels of Selamintes and his contemporaries when authors of the older gallant style have to be attacked:
I must know how to joke and seriously say joke-about-something. […] IV. If you have to avoid oratorical and especially hyperbolic types of speech: but if you need them, you have to moderate them either with certain words or with an interjected joke. V. One does not have to ponder splendid amplificationes and words, but rather write as clever and gallant people usually speak. The gallantry consists of a lot of jokes, the joke of a moderate freedom: But freedom is not linked to words […] VI. Do you finally have to avoid everything in this style that tastes like art or rules. For as soon as one knows that the writer is studying it; so the stylus is no longer gallant: and since carelessness is a mistake in other things, it becomes a virtue here.
The desired freedom in the more detailed instructions does not consist in the compulsion to continually break with rules - it consists in the informal handling of rules with ease. Gallant authors act with style when dealing with high-ranking readers who address them in appreciation, as well as when dealing with opponents whom they can address with conduite des duels in prefaces: The gallant author shows freedom in relation to the further reaction to his publication, one acts nonchalantly towards the readers for whom one writes, rejects responsibility, evades any criticism by referring to the little time that one wants to have spent with the work.
The stylistic settings, in their references to the freedom of the spoken versus the written language, favored novellism, the traditions of oral storytelling. A separate, distant spelling spreads with the 1670s in the scandalous novel. Here a special tone of indiscreet insinuation develops. Judging from the time lag, he has at times something spread out, twisted, indirect, playful and inauthentic. It is left to the reader to believe or not to believe, the author himself presents with disinterest and skepticism.
The “gallant world”, authors, audience and special public
Title pages of gallant novels regularly address the “gallant world” as the audience. The “young world” sometimes emerges as a less scandalous alternative in the second decade.
Pre-speeches and dedications are the central place to create this audience. As a rule, they are young and of mixed sex and await potentially scandalous interaction between authors in this market.
The authors mostly write under pseudonyms. Labels of female authorship such as: "by one of the fair sex" are directly gallant in English. In French, name abbreviations are gallant in the early 18th century, they reveal that someone here is definitely avoiding demand. In the German-speaking world, gallant pseudonyms developed in fashion spurts from the 1680s. Here, first of all, there is a distancing from the anagrams, from the meaningful pseudonyms as well as from the satirical names, which like Jan Rebhu make themselves ridiculous in the 1670s. "Greek names" become fashionable in the 1680s. August Bohse alias Talander sets the fashion here. The new name is borrowed from operas and late antique novels and should contain nuances of meaning at best. After choosing his pseudonym, Menantes noted that he liked that it had no further meaning - the author evades the association.
Names of this style are Menantes , Celander , Meletaon , Michael Erich Franck , Amaranthes , Selamintes and Adamantes . From around 1710 a branch line opens here with an implicitly scandalous orientation, which in the course of time allows new French name refusals. Names here are Sarcander , L'Indifferent , Le Content . At the same time, there is a clearer step taken by well-known authors on the English market to risk identity, to seek civic fame. "Astrea" became Aphra Behn in the 1690s . Delarivier Manley transforms herself on the front pages of her Atalantis from the anonymous translator to the bourgeois author “Mrs. Manley ”. Eliza Haywood 1719/1720 claims her debut Love in Excess with the real name as the work of a well-known author. English pseudonyms followed the trend in the 1720s with fictional real names such as Robinson Crusoe, Richard Falconer, and Duncan Campbell - responsibility is imitated here, gallant freedom superficially minimized.
The public of the gallant novel remains diffuse and unclear. Gallant novels are not reviewed. They provoke reactions, especially in the field of the gallant novel. They entertain, they set fashions; However, the information they spread is constantly creating only open secrets. One pretends to publish true stories, but names actors with mock uncertainty. The names with initial and final letters are popular: M ------- gh for Marlborough, or pseudonyms that are discovered in keys. It is popular to leave it to the gallant world to decipher who that who should be, the responsibility for the scandal is nonchalantly handed over to the audience by the author, who is concerned about his own freedom. The Galante Roman creates public. However, it wasn't until the secondary public emerged with modern literary review in the mid-18th century that the next step was reached: once novels are reviewed, critics can begin to relate to both novels and the public reaction to them, those with the reviews is given. The gallant novel says goodbye to the market as the review system arises and creates this new public with a critical search for responsible authors.
Web links
- Example of a historical gallant novel: The amorous and gallant student . 1750 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
See also
Footnotes
- ↑ Katja Barthel: Genus and Gender. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2016, ISBN 978-3-110-45988-3 , p. 398 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
- ↑ You Ernst Schubert, August Bohse, called Talander. A contribution to the history of the gallant time in Germany , [= Breslauer contributions to literary history, 27] (Breslau, 1911), Hermann Tiemann : The heroic-gallant novels of August Bohse. Diss. Kiel 1932, Heinlein, Otto, August Bohse-Talander as novelists of the gallant time [Diss. Greifswald, 1939] (Bochum, 1939), Lieselotte Brögelmann, studies of the narrative style in the “idealistic” novel from 1643-1733 with special consideration of August Bohse [Diss. masch.] (Greifswald, 1939) and added: Elizabeth Brewer: The Novel of Entertainment during the Gallant Era. A Study of the Novels of August Bohse . Bern: Lang 1983.
- ↑ See Singer, Herbert, Der galante Roman (Stuttgart, 1961) and his The German Roman Between Baroque and Rococo (Cologne / Graz, 1963) and, following him, Hans Wagener, The Composition of the Romane Christian Friedrich Hunolds , [= University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 94] (Berkeley / Los Angeles, 1969) like his foreword to CF Hunolds, Der Europæischen Höfe / Liebes- und Helden-Geschichte [Faks. Reprint d. Ed. (1705)] (Bern / Frankfurt a. M. / Las Vegas, 1978).
- ^ Rolf Grimminger, "Roman", in: Rolf Grimminger (ed.), Hanser's Social History of German Literature , 3 (Munich, 1983), pp. 635–715 - pp. 655–64 on the gallant novel.
- ^ John A. McCarthy, "The Gallant Novel and the German Enlightenment", DVjS 59 (1985), pp. 47-78.
- ↑ Bernhard Fischer, “Ethos, Convention and Individualization. Problems of the gallant novel in Christian Friedrich Hunold's European courts and in the Satyrisches Roman “, German quarterly journal for literary studies and intellectual history , 63.1 (1989), p.64-97.
- ↑ Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa, or, The novel before it became literature: an examination of the German and English book offerings from 1710 to 1720 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) and “To the corpus 'gallant' novels between Bohse and Schnabel, Talander und Gisander ”in The Work of Johann Gottfried Schnabel and the Novels and Discourses of the Early 18th Century, ed. v. Günter Dammann and Dirk Sangmeister (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2004), pp. 1–34.
- ^ Florian Gelzer, conversation, gallantry and adventure. Romanesque narration between Thomasius and Wieland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007).
- ↑ Thomas Borgstedt / Andreas Solbach: The gallant discourse : communication ideal and epoch threshold (Dresden: Thelem, 2001).
- ↑ Sylvia Heudecker / Dirk Niefanger / Jörg Wesche: Cultural Orientation in 1700 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).
- ↑ Dirk Niefanger's thesis of a “Sfumato” was taken up again by Stephan Kraft in his own work on Anton Ulrich's novels: Stephan Kraft: Unity and openness of the “Roman Octavia” by Duke Anton Ulrich . Epistemata 483 (Würzburg, 2004).
- ↑ Benjamin Neukrirch's instruction on Teutschenbriefe (Leipzig: Thomas Fritsch, 1721), reproduced from Der galante Stil: 1680-1730 ed. By Conrad Widemann (Tübingen, 1969), p. 42.
literature
- Herbert Singer, The German novel between baroque and rococo (Cologne / Graz, 1963).
- Wilhelm Vosskamp, aristocratic projections in the gallant novel by Christian Friedrich Hunold. On the change in function of the 'high' novel in the transition from the 17th to the 18th century. In: literary studies and social science 11. Legitimation crises of the German nobility 1200–1900. Ed. V. Peter Uwe Hohendahl / Paul Michael Lützeler. Stuttgart 1979, pp. 83-99.
- Bernhard Fischer, ethos, convention and individualization. Problems of the gallant novel in Chr. F. Hunold's European courts and in the satyrical novel . In: DVjS 59 (1985), pp. 64-97.
- John A. McCarthy, The Gallant Novel and the German Enlightenment. In: DVjS 59 (1985), pp. 47-78.
- Friedmann Harzer, heroic-gallant novel, gallant novel. In: Reallexikon der Deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. V. Klaus Weimar et al. Volume I, A-G. Berlin 1997, 41-42.
- Olaf Simons, Marteau's Europe, or, The Novel Before It Became Literature: An Investigation of the German and English Book Supply from 1710 to 1720 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). ISBN 90-420-1226-9
- Olaf Simons, "On the corpus of 'gallant' novels between Bohse and Schnabel, Talander and Gisander" in The Work of Johann Gottfried Schnabel and the Novels and Discourses of the Early 18th Century, ed. v. Günter Dammann and Dirk Sangmeister (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2004), pp. 1–34.
- Florian Gelzer, conversation, gallantry and adventure. Romanesque narration between Thomasius and Wieland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007). ISBN 978-3-484-36625-1
- Jörn Steigerwald, polite laugh. On the distinguishing comedy of court society: Hunold's satyrical novel . In: Funny bodies - funny texts. On the anthropology and mediality of the comic in the 17th century (1580–1730). Ed. V. Stefanie Arend, Thomas Borgstedt, Nicola Kaminski, Dirk Niefanger. Amsterdam 2008, pp. 325-355.