SOURCE: Introduction to Limestone and Other Stories, translated by David Luke, Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968, pp. 3-31.

In the following excerpt, Luke places Stifter's work in the context of Biedermeierera German culture.

The three stories in [Limestone and Other Stories] were all written toward the end of what is now often called the "Biedermeier" period of Austrian culture, which Stifter pre-eminently represents and yet transfigures. The last of them was first published in 1848. The Biedermeier "period," if it is possible to give it a chronological definition, corresponds roughly to that of Mettermeli's political ascendancy between 1815 and 1848 not only in Austria but effectively in the whole of Central Europe. Its outlook and values were the cultural accompaniment of a carefully sterilized autocratic anti-revolutionary regime. As in the eighteenth century, the development of German literature was still, or again, closely associated with the political powerlessness of the cultivated middle classes...