SOURCE: "Historical-Consciousness versus Action in C. F. Meyer's Das Amulett," in Symposium, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 114-32.

In the following essay, McCort discusses the stylistic techniques Meyer utilizes to achieve realism in Das Amulett.

It has been long in coming, but due recognition is finally being accorded Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's earliest novella, Das Amulett. As sometimes happens with works whose artistry is subtle, critical evaluation has come full circle. Deemed a triumph on publication for its integrity of plot structure, in the critical canon of our own century the novella fell to the status of an apprenticeship-exercise, faulted variously, even contradictorily, for awkward organization, strained symbolism, hedging on questions of destiny versus free will, and outright fatalism. Sporadic attempts to "rehabilitate" the work, from the mid-thirties through the late fifties, finally issued in a groundswell of positive revaluation in the late sixties and early seventies, a full...