Arbeit am Zufall : Die Formierung des modernen deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert

Sammanfattning: The present dissertation deals with the relationship between chance and the form of the German novel during its modernization in the eighteenth century. In novels by Wieland, Moritz and Goethe, ‘chance’ poses a complex of problems that the novels process in the course of their narrations and that in turn also influences how the German novel itself, as a new genre in the late eighteenth century, began to gain definition. The overarching thesis is that neither chance as it appears in the novel nor the novel itself have a fixed form in modernity, but that both arise as part of the same dynamic and evolve in interaction with one another. In this context, the ‘work on chance’ describes the process whereby the novels under consideration seek to define their form by exploring different ways that chance can be given shape in the narrative. The work on chance is thus at the same time an examination of the possibilities of the form of the novel, which the narratives of Wieland, Moritz and Goethe undertake in three different ways. What ultimately unites them is the way that the form of the novel emerges as the protagonist of the story being told, thus making the novel itself the hero of the modern German novel.