Abstract EN:

This dissertation is a study of the influence of “gallant” libertine literature from England and France on German literary creation in the last three decades of the 18th century. The number of translations and critical commentaries which appeared at the time testifies to the successful impact in Germany of four novels of seduction, the very emblems of the genre, namely Clarissa Harlowe, Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit, Le Paysan perverti and Les Liaisons dangereuses. It is therefore legitimate to search for echoes of those works in the German production of the late 18th century. The survey of scientific evidence of the attention paid to those novels (openly acknowledged influence, critical comments or explicit marks of intertextuality) results in the selection of six German writers, also enthusiastic readers of the books, whose works display a reflection of the tradition of “gallant” libertine literature, viz. Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche, Wilhelm Heinse, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano and Jean Paul. The confrontation between the German novels and the “sources” reveals the presence of the main motifs of “gallant” libertine literature: typology of characters, strategy of seduction and key phases in the plot. Yet it is inseparable from a systematic use of distortion. The parody of a series of narrative techniques and the recourse to “perverted imitation” bear witness to a process of distanciation in which both the originality of the literary heirs and the specifically German sensibility of a fast expanding literature assert themselves. By giving new directions to certain fundamental principles of the libertine quest, the latest German works in the corpus alter the initial libertine doctrine and pave the way for new areas of existential questions, thus foreshadowing the disillusioned artistic figures of the 19th century.