In 1898 Wilhelm Raabe proclaimed his historical narrative Hastenbeck to be the "companion piece" to his 1888 novel Odfeld : "In the wake of the Iliad from the Duchy of Braunschweig comes the Odyssey from the Duchy of Braunschweig." By tracing how Raabe drew on the archetypes of the heroic epic ( The Iliad ), the love story ( The Odyssey ), and the historical novel (Vergil's Aeneid as a combination of the two great Homeric epics and as precursor for Walter Scott's Waverley ), this study weaves a complex history of the German national epic as a literary genre.
The book series Studies in the History of German Literature covers the whole spectrum of research into German literary history and comprises monographs and collected volumes on individual epochs from the close of the Middle Ages up to the present day. It presents contributions explicating central concepts from literary history and on individual authors and works.
