The sentimentalization of the unpleasant: Naturalism, censorship and the British reception of Hermann Sudermann's The Song of Songs (1909)

Abstract

This paper begins by exploring the censorship of The Song of Songs (1909), the first English translation of Hermann Sudermann's Das Hohe Lied (1906).1 While the novel's British reception is contextualized by the perceived social dangers of sexual representation in foreign literature, the essay demonstrates that Sudermann's novel not only inscribes a critique of moral censure and the aesthetic idealism that often underpinned it, but also parodies the Naturalist novel which itself was believed to radically challenge sexual reticence in British fiction. © The Author(s) 2013.