SOURCE: Introduction to The Complete Narrative Prose of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Vol. I: 1872-1879, translated by George F. Folkers, David B. Dickens, and Marion W. Sonnenfeld, Bucknell University Press, 1976, pp. 11-27.

In the following essay, Folkers provides a stylistic and thematic overview of Meyer's novellas,

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898) is a prominent figure in German literature and one of the most important of the Swiss writers. He was the son of a prosperous family in Zurich, and his maturation reflects the problematical intellectual climate of post-Napoleonic Europe and the age of positivism, a climate by nature hostile to literary endeavors because of its materialistic orientation. Meyer succeeded in forging an expositional technique which not only was comprehended and appreciated by his contemporaries, but which also transcends its time to remain artistically valid to the twentieth-century reader of perception and sensitivity. This is Meyer's literary achievement.

Meyer's background prepared...