| The story my dissertation aims to tell occupies the intersection of two cultural-historical developments in the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century; the emergence during that century of our contemporary notion of everyday life, and the approximately coterminous rise of a global consciousness. In becoming a common, generalized condition, everyday life became a universally applicable lens for viewing human activity. Global consciousness – a new imagination of the world as a single place; its manifold inhabitants living collectively and simultaneously – reinforced the universality of that everyday life. Around 1800, the Orient was categorically not alltäglich . Oriental persons and things were constitutively fantastic or extraordinary. After 1850, cultural producers began to represent Alltagsleben in the Orient. For the first time, Orientals became ordinary. My project explores the emergence, in nineteenth-century German literature, of the everyday Orient and the ordinary Oriental. I begin by surveying prose works from 1790-1850 to demonstrate that for Romantic and authors of the following decades, the Orient was synonymous with the wondrous and extraordinary. I then turn to the Realist works of Wilhelm Raabe, Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane, which borrow from and ironize the Romantic vision of the Orient in representing Oriental everydayness. |
