Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s-1930s

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Gisela Argyle is an associate professor of humanities at York University
and the author of German Elements in the Fiction of George Eliot,
Gissing, and Meredith. In Germany as Model and Monster, she critically
examines allusions in English fiction to German social, cultural, and
political life from 1830 to just before the rise of Hitler’s Third
Reich—an interval in which immense sociopolitical transformations of
both countries animated their ambivalent relations to each other.

Argyle’s primary focus is on a selection of writings by George Eliot,
Thomas Carlyle, George Meredith, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Gissing,
Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence as it relates to the
representation of and reaction to various German paradigms: Goethe’s
concept of Bildung and the Bildungsroman, Tьbingen higher criticism,
Heine’s anti-Philistinism, Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s
philosophies, Prussian militarism, and Weimar avant-garde culture.

To illuminate the weight of these allusions in the broader public
dialogue as well as the reciprocal historical and discursive conditions
under which the writings were produced, Argyle aptly oscillates between
literary and extraliterary contexts. The latter include plenty of other
sources: biographical materials, periodical articles, contemporaneous
literary works, and pictorial evidence, such as W.M. Thackeray and Punch
cartoons.

Argyle’s work rests on the methodology that combines theories of
allusion with Jauss’s principles of reception. Thus, the power and
purpose of the English novelists’ allusions to German thought are
examined within the complex triangle of author–text–audience. In
other words, Germany is viewed as a vehicle of self-conscious
disengagement from the native culture in order to critique it in terms
of other, resulting in either a positive or negative model for English
sociopolitical revival. In addition, German texts are also seen as an
esthetic tool of sorts, a licence for alternative practice of fiction
itself. Such dialectic, Argyle concludes, hardly exists in the
contemporary literature, given the English and global trend of
“cultural minimalism and omission of cultural allusions,” which
renders this kind of literary comparison almost obsolete.