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Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimusremains the one German novel of its time that has attained the stature of "world literature": its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayalof a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those interested in the development of the picaresque novel in Europe, the work and its "Continuations" have increasingly occupied scholars around the world, who have in recent years shown it to be a work ofsubtle structure and characterization, bearing the imprint of the most advanced political thinking of the time, and showing the influences of some of the most significant works of world literature, including Cervantes' Don Quixote and Barclay's Argenis. This volume of essays by leading Grimmelshausen scholars from Germany, the United States, and England provides analyses of significant topics in his life and works, including questions of genre, structure, satire, allegory, narratology, political thought, religion, morality, humor, realism, and mortality. Contributors: Christoph E. Schweitzer, Italo Michele Battafarano, Klaus Haberkamm, Rosmarie Zeller, Andreas Solbach, Dieter Breuer, Lynne Tatlock, Peter Hess, Shannon Keenan Greene, and Alan Menhennet.
KarlF. Otto is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on German Baroque literature.
Johann (Hans) Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621 or 1622–17 August 1676) is deservedly the best known and most often read German novelist of the seventeenth century. In fact, he is the only author who can act as a bridge between the first and second classical periods of German literature, the first being that of high medieval literature, which reached its peak around 1200, with works such as the anonymous heroic epic Nibelungenlied and the courtly epics of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strasbourg, and the second that of German Classicism around 1800, which includes among its major writers Goethe and Schiller. Grimmelshausen is furthermore a writer whose works have stimulated an enormous quantity of scholarly studies over the past thirty years. This virtually unique activity in German Baroque studies has to do with a series of “discoveries” about several aspects of his works that mark them not as the naïve productions of an unlearned, “natural” author, but as the creations of a writer who consciously used exceedingly sophisticated and subtle modes of characterization, expression of symbolic meaning, and of narrative structure. His best known novel, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668; first translated as The Adventurous Simplicissimus, 1912) is Germany's only early modern contribution to the canon of world-class literature. Because of the details that they provide about the times, especially about the Thirty Years’ War, Grimmelshausen's picaresque novels are widely read by historians as well as by students of literature. That novel forms the focus of the Simplician cycle of novels (a total of five different novelistic works), but the figure of Simplicius Simplicissimus is found in many of his other works as well.
Biographical Sketch
Grimmelshausen's exact date of birth is not known. Although many assume he was born in 1621, some evidence in Simplicissimus indicates he was born in 1622, and, using astrological data presented there, some scholars hold that he was born on 17 March 1622. His hometown was Gelnhausen (Hessia), although his family originally came from Suhl (Thuringia). His father died when Grimmelshausen was very young. Although the exact date of death is not known, we do know that Grimmelshausen's mother remarried in 1627.