Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May and Other German Novelists of America (University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature) (University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages & Literatures, #121)

by Jeffrey L Sammons

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This study of German fiction about America in the 19th century concentrates in detail on three writers: Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl, 1793-1864), an escaped Moravian monk who came to New Orleans in 1823 and during the 1830s and 1840s wrote the first major German novels about the United States; Friedrich Gerstacker (1816-1872), who, among his many experiences in America as a young man, lived as a backwoodsman in Arkansas and who later produced a large body of fiction, travel reportage and emigration advice; and Karl May (1842-1912), who, though he knew nothing about America beyond what he could read in books such as those by Sealsfield and Gerstacker, wrote famous adventure storties set in an imginary West and became the best-selling writer in the German language, whose sales by now have exceeded 100 million volumes. Sammons interweaves his discussion of these writers with excurses into the emergence of the German Western and anti-Americanism in German fiction.
  • ISBN10 080788121X
  • ISBN13 9780807881217
  • Publish Date 7 September 1998
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 25 January 2021
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 424
  • Language English