SOURCE: "Problems of Realism in Immermann's Die Epigonen," in Oxford German Studies, Vol. 16, 1985, pp. 66-80.

In the following excerpt, Minden analyzes some of the literary devices Immermann employed in Die Epigonen to depict German culture in the 1820s.

Die Epigonen (1836) cannot refer to the validating authority that the notion of realism was later to come to offer the genre of the novel. The absence of a stable mimetic focus is one of the most striking things about it … Sammons [in Six Essays on The Young German Novel] rightly observes: 'Every world that Immermann constructs, houses the potential of grotesque catastrophe.' The novel slips from register to register, or from language to language, so that each mode of discourse relativises the others. Indeed, as critics from Lauschus to Sengle have pointed out, this is one of the novel's greatest stylistic virtues. At the same time, because it is...