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Paper short abstract

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the portrayal of enchanted forests in German Realism and Romanticism from the perspective of queer theory and ecocriticism, as well as an examination of the role of strange, genderless children in nature’s ‘agency’.

Paper long abstract

With the literary eras of the “long” 19th century, there are numerous examples of works that address a theme related to nature: The relationship between humans and nature, the dichotomous division of all aspects of life between nature and culture, the immeasurable and violent power of nature, and the tumultuous category of ‘agency’, are motifs that undoubtedly characterize both German Romanticism and Realism, which are in reality much more alike/hybridized than the artificial division of certain canonical readings allow to appear.

For example, when reading Adalbert Stifter’s story “Katzensilber”, one can recognize defining features of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “Das fremde Kind”: a strange, genderless child appears in the neighbouring forest and exerts a decisive influence on a pair of siblings, namely on the way they see and determine their existence in nature. With Stifter’s narrative, German literary research focuses mainly on the antithetical nature-culture conceptual pair, whereas Hoffmann’s work is taken as an opportunity to examine the opposition between imagination and reason.

However, I intend to focus on the structural resemblance of the above narratives, by examining aspects such as hybrid identity, the performativity of nature, and human interaction with nature from a queer and ecocritical perspective. Moreover, I aim to understand to what extent the spatial structure and associated representation of nature in Hoffmann’s work can be understood as a critique of a capitalist cis-heteronormativity, and whether Stifter’s story could (or should) actually be read as a fairy tale, in order to grasp its full transgressive potential.