Wilhelm Raabe, after exceptional fluctuations in reputation, has come to be recognized as a major nineteenth-century German fiction writer; a rather sudden burgeoning of scholarship and interpretation has put understanding of him on an entirely new footing. Although a few of his works have been translated into foreign languages, he is little known outside the German-speaking countries; nevertheless, British, Canadian, and American scholars have played a major role in his modern rehabilitation. They have recognized him as a writer of the Victorian age who was a conscious successor to Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, and as an experimenter in ironic narration whose techniques prefigure those of modern fiction. More recently, German scholars have sensed in him a subtle recorder of the psyche of the German bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Raabe always resisted biography on the grounds that his life was of no...