Landschaft im Nachbild

Around 1900, landscape experienced a boom in a variety of cultural discourses. But what part did landscape play for literature of that period? In this study, Agnes Hoffmann reconstructs its relevance for literary modernism, focusing on the prose work of Henry James and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In contrast to the widespread thesis of the ,rejection’ of nature in literary works of that period, she shows how literature adopted models of landscape aesthetics that were rich in tradition – like the picturesque landscape and the Romantic ,Stimmungslandschaft‘ –, thus enabling a definition and analysis of the modern human being and art against the background of the intellectual and aesthetic revolutions at the turn of the century. This source study also looks at conceptions of landscape in the theory and practice of aesthetics, cultural anthropology and phenomenology in the period examined. In doing so, it reveals how, to date, diverse interdisciplinary connections between how landscape is conceived interdiscursively in literature and related fields.