Adalbert Stifter's monumental novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), which spans three volumes in the critical edition, bears the subtitle “Eine Erzählung”—a story. While this diminutive genre designation can be understood as a vestige from a drawn-out process of composition, it leaves open the question of genre and draws attention to the form of the text. In response to criticism the novel received, Stifter moreover claimed that readers had the wrong genre expectations, commenting in a letter to his publisher Gustav Heckenast that whoever “eine Heiratsgeschichte liest und hiebei rückwärts eine veraltete Liebesgeschichte erfärt, der weiß sich mit dem Buche ganz und gar nicht zu helfen” ([whoever] reads a wedding tale and, in so doing, retroactively experiences an old love story, is missing the entire point of the book). This begs the question: What comes to the fore if the marriage plot fades into the background, and how might the formal qualities of the text itself draw readerly attention to what is really at stake? Based on an examination of the stylistic decisions and genre characteristics of Der Nachsommer, and with a consideration of Stifter's landscape painting, I will examine the ways in which both artistic media use formal techniques of creating depth and space rather than guiding the focus toward the protagonists and foreground. In the process, I argue that Stifter's novelistic style relativizes the importance of the human actors, disrupting expectations of the figureground relationship and creating a new kind of narrative in which the surrounding environment and the connections between things come more clearly into view.

On 1 and 2 April 1798 Haydn conducted two performances of the choral version of his Seven Last Words in Vienna. During the interval of the second concert Beethoven played his op.16 Quintet with a group of wind players that included the most celebrated clarinettist of the day, Joseph Bähr (or Beer), and it is reasonable to suppose that his unconventionally scored trio for piano, clarinet and cello op.11, composed shortly afterwards, was written for him. He was born in the same year as Beethoven, and in 1787 he entered the service of Prince Öttingen-Wallerstein of Bavaria. A fellow member of the Prince's orchestra was the cellist and composer Friedrich Witt (remembered today for having concocted the so-called ‘Jena’ Symphony, once attributed to Beethoven); and the two musicians, having paid a visit to the Berlin court at Potsdam in 1794, arrived in Vienna together two years later, where Bähr found employment with Prince Liechtenstein. Significantly enough, several of Beethoven's works featuring the clarinet in an important role date from the years 1796–1802. Besides the op.11 Trio, they include the slow movement of the C major Piano Concerto op.15, and that of the Septet op.20. The latter work was first performed exactly a year after the premiere of the clarinet trio, at a benefit concert for Beethoven in which Ignaz Schuppanzigh played the violin, and Bähr the clarinet. Also first performed at a Schuppanzigh concert, in April 1805, was the Sextet op.71 for two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung commented that the first clarinet part had been ‘absolutely perfectly played’ by Bähr.

Eduard Claudius's 1950 short story “Die Geburt” (TheBirth) opens in the spring of 1947 with the veteranGerman ironworker Laube crouching behind a cratewhile “Frauen in zerrissenen Schuhwerk, inverschmutzten Kleidern, mit stumpfen Augen undausgemergelten Leibern” (women in tattered footwear,in filthy clothes, with numb eyes and hag¬gardbodies) help disassemble his foundry's machinery forSoviet war reparations. Laube is plotting with thetechnician Hanke to sabotage the crane in an attemptto prevent the dismantling of this factory where hehas spent his working life “in das Getöse vonFlammen und Lärm, in den tollen Wirbel der Arbeit”(DG 422: in the roar of flames and noise, in thegreat whirl of work). When Hanke asks how long Laubewill stand by and watch “wie sie alles einpacken undnach Russland schicken” (how they are packing upeverything and sending it to Russia), Laube explodesin rage: “Unsere Fabriken? … Unser? … Was gehörteschon uns? Nichts.

Bede has told us about the upper classes, reporting as a trusted commentator near in time and ofering opinions on events, real or visionary. Archaeology, on the other hand, tells us about numerous individuals and individual actions, well located in both place and time. Their signifcance is not stated in words, but in materials and images with many possible meanings that must be deduced and decided by archaeological reasoning. The text is limited in scope and a record of one man's opinions; the archaeology is limitless in scope but more open to varied interpretation. Archaeologists also need to take care not to attribute cultural material too readily to the ethnic groups that Bede mentions – Angles, Saxons, and of course Britons – and to the speakers of the English, Welsh, Pictish and Irish languages that he recognised. Objects, and especially graves, have their own means of expression, that need not map onto these groups. The mixture of immigrants and indigenous people was well advanced by the later sixth century when British names are found among Wessex kings, and regions began to express their own identities. Since many of these regions coalesced into kingdoms at the time, and we know roughly where they were, I shall use these, and centuries, to indicate cultural regions and periods and ‘Old English’ for the language they spoke and wrote. Our own region is of course East Anglia, where the ship was found.

In our period neither text nor archaeology is the more senior account, just observations of the same world from diferent windows, and we shall be looking for ways in which they may converge. From archaeology we learn of the increasing investment by burial parties in the graves of individuals, the men in the late sixth-early seventh century and the women in the mid-seventh.

The history of the Isle of Man in the period 1405 to 1830 has for many years been overlooked. These centuries sit awkwardly in all the main narratives of historical development and debate which have touched on the Island. The Island's position has meant it has been outside the historiographical mainstream in England and elsewhere. Locally, there has been a culture of historical thinking and writing in the Island in the last century and a half, but for various reasons it has not placed particular emphasis on the late medieval and early modern period, sometimes seeing those centuries as ones of particular obscurity, decline and even corruption. It is this context which the current volume and its partner intend to address, with this introduction exploring some of the reasons why an island at the centre of the British Isles can still rely on its own core historical narratives established over a century ago while being largely invisible to those in the nations around it.

It was not that the Isle of Man was unknown to the historians who mapped the key outlines of English, British and Imperial history in the late nineteenth century. These were the decades in which the ‘visiting trade’ grew exponentially, with numbers passing through the Island growing to 347,968 in May-September 1887. Spencer Walpole completed his A History of England: From the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, a key text in establishing the narrative outline of nineteenth-century history, in the period after 1882 when he became lieutenant governor of the Island. But the Island was invisible, particularly to the major ‘national’ historiographies led from leading higher education institutions in the years from the second half of the nineteenth century.