Robber novel

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The robber novel is a genre of the novel that has been popular in German and English literature since the 18th century . At the center of the story is the “noble robber ” who stands outside the law, commits crimes and often ends up as a “criminal”, but on the other hand also acts as the protector and liberator of the poor and the unlawful or as a rebel against the arbitrariness of those in power. The literary tension arises from this relationship between hero and antihero figure in which the protagonist is placed. Robber novels emerged mainly in political transition phases, in which they became a projection surface for the conflict between old and new structures of rule.

Historical development

Preforms and material history

The first preliminary stage of the robber novel is an English folk -book- like prose story that appeared in 1678 and dealt with the (historically inconceivable ) figure Robin Hood ; he had already changed from a freeman to an outlaw . The literary response had already begun at the beginning of the 16th century with ballads and continued in several collections such as Robin Hood's Garland (1670) as well as Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood (1795). It remained in historiography during the Elizabethan era , but above all in drama , and later became one of the main models for the later material processing in trivial literature up to the adaptations in children's and youth literature and in films, whereby here the character of the adventure story predominated.

In addition to the legendary folk traditions in the 17th and 18th centuries, heroic tales such as Daniel Defoe's The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honorable Colonel Jacque (1722), Henry Fielding's satirical The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great ( 1743). The pirate novel took a new direction , from Defoes Life, Adventures and Piracies of Captain Singleton (1720) to James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover (1827) about the character of the sea pirate.

With the political development that initiated the rebellion against the Ancien Régime and which eventually led to the formation of new bourgeois norms, the robber novel found new impetus. The bourgeois protest attitude and the pathos of freedom, which found their expression in the German Sturm und Drang , combined with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idealization of the “ noble savage ” and its transfer to the figure of the “noble robber”, which the contemporary development of the gang system as current Reference and reinterpreted sociologically.

Robber novels since the turn of the 19th century

The starting point of the actual robber novel was Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Räuber (1781), which summarizes and popularizes previous tendencies - shaping the hero figure, political-social tensions, changes in the image of man - in the figure of Karl Moor. As a result of this drama and the market-oriented entertainment literature emerging at the same time, the genre is divided into two main currents; these partially overlap.

The first form occurs with the artistic claim to deepen the subject psychologically and to pursue goals that are critical of society or time. Schiller's criminal report The Criminal from Lost Honor (1786, original title Crimes from Infamy ) should be mentioned here, alongside Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (1808/1810) and (in part) Achim von Arnim's Angelika, the Genoese, and Cosmus, the rope jumper (published together with Isabella of Egypt in the so-called collection of novels from 1812 ), later also Hermann Kurz 's novel Der Sonnenwirt about Schiller's Sturm und Drang material, which is now gradually beginning to decline. In later years Leonhard Frank's novel Die Räuberbande (1914) with the sequels Das Ochsenfurt Men's Quartet (1927) and From three million three (1932), especially Die Jünger Jesu (1949), also Giuseppe Berto's Il brigante (1951) belong to this type. and - in part - Alfred Döblin's The Three Jumps of Wang-lun (1915).

Historical events processed u. a. Walter Scott in Rob Roy and in the Robin Hood episodes of Ivanhoe or the Black Knight (1819), which also come close to the knight novel, Cooper in The Bravo (1831) and Carl Zuckmayer's Moritatenstück Schinderhannes (1927). You grab u. a. the tradition of folk lore and earlier literary developments.

The second form is more of a mixture with forms of adventure and crime novels , also with those of the secret society novel and the gothic novel . Above all, it includes works that are stressed and tense , which in the trivial genres also depict private or social desires or serve to satisfy the need for sensation through colportage rather than striving for artistic depth. Figures like the robber's bride or other women under the spell of the robber and his stereotypical character portrayal rather create a closeness to erotic-pornographic, sentimental, sometimes kitschy spheres.

Among the best-known works are Heinrich Zschokke's secret society novel Abällino the great bandit (1793) as the forerunner of the horror romance and Christian August Vulpius ' six-volume Rinaldo Rinaldini, the robber captain (partial volumes 1799-1801), which was always the most popular German-language work of the genre until the 20th century was reissued, edited and filmed several times, finally Carl Gottlob Cramer wrote colportage novels such as Der Dom-Schütz und seine Gesellen (1803) in series production .

A connection to the (literarily demanding) detective novel can be found in Eugène Sue in Les Mystères de Paris (1843), Alexandre Dumas the Elder La San-Felice et Emma Lyonna (1865) and in Charles Dickens ' serial novels , to the adventure novel in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Iceland (1883), especially for the Wild West novel in Friedrich Gerstäcker's Die Rußpiraten des Mississippi (1848). The narrative technique , which is mostly loosely trained in novelistic style, emphasizes a chain of individual, action-rich events rather than closed storylines.

More authors and works

literature

  • Johann Wilhelm Appell: The knight, robber and horror romance . On the history of German entertainment literature. Leipzig 1859 ( digitized ).
  • Holger Dainat: Abaellino, Rinaldini and the like. On the history of the robber novels in Germany. Studies and texts on the social history of literature 55. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1996.
  • Peter Domalgalski: Trivial literature. History production reception . Breisgau 1981.
  • Carl Müller-Fraureuth: The knight and robber novels . A contribution to the educational history of the German people. Hall a. P. 1894.

Film adaptations

Web links