Shared Village Stories: How (Not) to Disentangle Literary Historiography from ‘Modernization’

Abstract

The village story is a well-established topic of German literary history. Beginning around 1840 in the Germanophone countries, authors, readers and critics referred to a then-emerging genre by the word “Dorfgeschichte” (Baur 1978). At that time, Sweden, France, Denmark and Hungary also experienced a rise in the number of stories published about rural, mostly village, life. This new form of narrative prose soon turned out to be a pan-European phenomenon (Zellweger 1941). Of course, poets had dealt with the village before. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), for example, is one of the most highly acclaimed eighteenth-century poems. “The first natural medium for a subject so close to the pastoral and to the poetry of nature,” Julia Patton remarks, “seems to have been verse rather than prose” (Patton 1974, 190). It was only after 1800 that a new kind of village prose developed in England without being subsumed, for the time being, under a particular genre category. Since then, village stories have appeared in many parts of the world, and continue to do so today. However, most authors have probably never heard of those who founded the genre, and very few would themselves label their narratives as Dorfgeschichten. While there has been some discussion about derevenskaia proza (village prose) in twentieth-century Russia (Parthé 1992), the concept of a specific genre defined by this subject matter has remained a German particularity. The following remarks are based on the assumption that this nineteenth-century emic concept can nonetheless be used for classification and comparative analysis, because it is also suited to capture the recurring features of texts from an etic perspective.