Techniques of Solipsism : A Study of Theodor Storm’s Narrative Fiction

Abstract

Theodor Storm, born in 1817, was at first a poet of the bleak North Sea plains, but emerged after the liberal revolutions of 1848 as a major German writer of novellas. Though considered a social realist, Storm also asked more introspective questions, bordering on the tragic and the mysterious. In his final novella Der Schimmelreiter, 1888, which Thomas Mann greatly admired, the rider on the white horse of the title is in fact a young dyke-master, struggling to rebuild his remote village’s flood defences: a matter of life and death, and his white horse is believed by superstitious locals to be the ghost of a skeleton once unearthed nearby. This landmark study of Storm’s novellas is divided into three parts: Rogers considers first how loneliness is presented in Storm’s fictional worlds; then, how stories are told by far-from-omniscient narrators, or by minor characters whose identities are disguised; and finally, how the writer turned in his last and most troubled years to the question of human responsibility. This book, originally published in 1970 and later given the ISBN 978-0-900547-05-8, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.