SOURCE: "Adalbert Stifter and the Reception of His Work," in The Novel in England and Germany, Oswald Wolff, 1981, pp. 59-86.

In the following excerpt, Klieneberger proposes reasons for the wide fluctuations in Stifter's reputation.

There are few, if any, writers whose reputation has fluctuated as widely, who have been the subject of as much controversy among critics and literary historians as Stifter has. For there is a radical ambiguity about him which has fascinated and repelled one generation of readers after another. His work exemplifies in a particularly acute form the problems raised by the German contribution to prose-fiction: the critical response to Stifter's fiction illustrates the difficulties which critics and the reading-public had in coming to terms with a characteristic product of a German narrative tradition. A close look at it is therefore called for in the context of this study.

Stifter's situation was that of many...