The literary representation of the economic in the German novel, 1855 # 1901

This dissertation presents a new perspective for the study of the German bourgeois realistic prose, by parallelizing literary poetics, financial epistemology, commercial procedures of observation and registration. Based on a corpus of literary programmes, economic studies, commercial and financial manuals, a poetology of credit-economic knowledge is first established. The nexus of these apparently very different paradigms of aesthetics and epistemology respectively is constituted by a moment of idealisation: just as the banker or entrepreneur, as the subject of observation, has to discern an absent, yet probable added value, so the literary author defined by contemporaneous criticism has to approach social reality with optimism – he offers no neutral representation of a raw reality, but the nucleus of a better future.

In this way, the procedures of accountancy become a medium – in the metaphoric sense – for literary and social reproduction. With this tool, a selection of canonised prose texts from German realism is studied. In general, literary semiosis in realistic texts is considered to take place on the level of significance, produced by the literary representation and plot. The production of the representation itself on the level of the text is considered to be culturally automatized and of less aesthetic interest. The goal of this dissertation is precisely to inquire into the constitution of the literary representation itself, by way of the above metaphorological apparatus that was derived from the historical discursive material on economics.