John D. Lyons examines some of the most canonical works of the seventeenth-century Golden Age: Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) and Rodogune (1644–45), and Racine’s Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677), proposing that the decisive actions of these plays often hinge on what women say, or do not say. This is far from surprising since these works are contemporaneous with two important interrelated cultural developments in the public lives of women: increasingly, they hosted Parisian salons and gaining increased importance in the political, cultural and social spheres; and in a century that witnessed attempts to standardize and refine the French language, these salons run by women became virtual workshops for formulating rules of discourse for a worldly, non-pedantic society. Tragedies from this period, perceived as the dramatic representation of the lives of kings, queens and princes, simultaneously display the sharp contrast between what can women say in public, what they conceal owing to the constraints on what they are allowed to say, and their awareness that what they say in public can have fatal consequences. These tragedies enable an appreciation of the aptness of Roland Barthes’ assertion that language, more than death, is the core of the tragic.

A landmark orients, signals a turning point, indicates a boundary. Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was immediately recognized, both by those who disliked it and those who appreciated it, as announcing a new approach to plot structure, representation of society, plausibility (or its lack), and character development. Later the terms ‘psychology’ and ‘analysis’ were used to point to the narrative’s approach to portraying the feelings and thoughts of the protagonist. One of the most obvious ways in which the text distinguishes itself from other novels of its period is its brevity. This quality gives it particular staying-power as a landmark, making it useful in school curricula as an example of the literature of its period—though this use risks skewing the view of seventeenth-century novels by presenting a striking, innovative exception, as the norm. Because landmarks indicate boundaries, they can serve as symbols of the territories they define. La Princesse de Clèves serves today as a marker of the cultural tradition of France itself. It is thus at the centre of debates about the literary canon and of national identity. For both the seventeenth century and for the twenty-first, Lafayette’s work fuels debate.

Vance Byrd's monograph demonstrates how the panorama helped create a modern sense of identity for the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Germany. The panorama was a popular visual medium, yet most Germans experienced it not firsthand, but in printed texts. Germans could read descriptions of panoramas, purchase guides and keys to well-known panoramas, and find panorama-like perspectives and metaphors in the literature of their time. Consequently, Byrd treats the panorama as both medium and metaphor, as both physical object and as practices that advanced a “literary pedagogy of observation.” Panoramas and their literary manifestations created an immersive world in which to debate the potentialities of modern life.

The first chapter of this book analyzes the invention of the panorama and highlights the ephemera and material objects that accompanied it: advertisements, guidebooks, keys, etc. These tools made a panorama readable, but also made it less immediate; they interrupted the sense of visual engagement and immersion with the panorama itself. Hence, the panoramic experience was not an unfettered gaze comprehending a unified compositional field, but entailed the reconciliation of that visual field with accumulated information, details, and facts gained through reading. Such readings helped audiences transform visual experience into experiences of the imagination. “The cognitive and intellectual process of producing and seeing a panorama, the attempt at unifying nature, history, and politics under the same gaze, illustrates the totalizing ambition of this mode of representation” (32), an ambition that endured in literature of the nineteenth century.

The second chapter details the treatment of the panorama in fashion journals, most prominently in F. J. Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786– 1827), and traces how the journal brought the panorama from the heterotopia of the popular fair to the bourgeois household. The journals made the panorama German (asserting its German rather than British provenance), bourgeois (linking panoramas to the bourgeois landscape garden), and domestic (panoramic images became fashionable entertainments within bourgeois households). Panoramas thus allowed Germans to envision themselves as bourgeois subjects of a potentially modern nation.

ON THE OCCASION of Theodor Fontane's two hundredth birthday, his reaction to an earlier birthday yields food for thought. Fontane describes his seventieth birthday celebration to Heinrich Jacobi on January 23, 1890:

The disparity in perception between modern Berlin and old Prussia clearly troubles Fontane; one senses that, at some level, he longs to be acknowledged by traditional Prussia, much as he may despise it, and that his image of himself as a writer does not coincide with the image that the literary world has of him. This tension, even contradiction, mirrors the enigmatic reception of Fontane in subsequent generations and particularly in the English-speaking world. Fontane is sometimes an advocate for the declining landed nobility of Prussia, sometimes the pioneer of the modernist metropolis, the champion of rural Prussia and Brandenburg but also of cosmopolitan London and the world at large. Is he regressive or progressive, an advocate of provincialism or cosmopolitanism, a traditionalist or a modernist? Fontane's staying power comes in part from his resistance to easy classification according to such binaries. He still speaks to us today because he sustains a productive tension between both the modernist idol and the compassionate, albeit ironic, chronicler of “old Prussia.”

With this volume celebrating Fontane's two hundredth birthday, we engage the tension between the modern and the traditional, the contemporary and the historical in Fontane by offering a range of contributions from the world of English-language Fontane scholarship in the twenty-first century. Balancing the competing demands of fidelity to the author's history and literary production in the nineteenth century with the interests of our own era requires recognizing both the striking similarities and the stark differences between the late-nineteenth and the early-twenty-first centuries.

THEODOR FONTANE's 1892 NOVEL Frau Jenny Treibel foregrounds conflicts within the Prussian middle class, specifically between the Besitzbürgertum (propertied middle class) and the Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class). Onto the divisions between these two subgroups Fontane projects binary oppositions such as modern and traditional, prose and poetry, and materialism and idealism, respectively. The subtitle of the novel, “Wo sich Herz zum Herzen find't” (14:3; When Heart to Heart Is Paired, 46), suggests that the novel might reconcile these polarities. Indeed, as Hugo Aust notes, resolution was an essential aesthetic criterion when Fontane reviewed literary works as a critic. Yet we do not find real resolution in this novel, for Fontane portrays these two groups as irreconcilably divided. If hearts are paired in the novel, then it occurs only within each subgroup of the Bürgertum, not across their boundaries.

What relevance might this unresolved nineteenth-century internecine class conflict have for the first half of the twenty-first century? In this novel Fontane stages a conflict with implications broader than the narrow temporal and geographical confines of nineteenth-century bourgeois Berlin society. He maps the distinctions within the Berliner bourgeoisie onto conceptions of both the nature and geography of Europe: on the one hand, a more modern, industrialized Europe, characterized by commerce and identified with Northern and Western Europe, England in particular; on the other, an ancient Europe, grounded in a rich cultural tradition and identified with Southern and Southeastern Europe, specifically Italy and Greece. The failed attempts to reconcile the differences between subgroups of the bourgeoisie reflect pessimism not only toward class reconciliation but also toward attempts at reconciliation and unity on a transnational scale. The inability to overcome the rift between Besitzbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum, between materialism and culture, suggests that, in Fontane's perspective, attempts at transnational unity such as we find in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will only perpetuate the failed attempts to reconcile these differences.

To some it might seem far-fetched to search for transnational and global issues in Fontane, who has been described as a Berlin author, a “particularist of the metropolis.” Yet Fontane was keenly aware of the world outside of Germany, not least from his time as a foreign correspondent in London (1855–59). In a recent article Roland Berbig offers a close historical reading of the first week of May during Fontane's 1858 visit to London as a demonstration in nuce of Fontane's international awareness and engagement.