The Monster in Between: Minimal Hybridism in Theodor Fontane’s 'Effi Briest'

Abstract

This essay discusses the possibility of a minimal novelistic hybridism in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. Considering that both the 18^th-century rise of the novel and its 20^th-century crisis produced a large number of heterogeneous narrative forms, the 19^th-century historical realism mould suggests a less hybrid counter-norm within an arguably non-normative genre. Hence, I submit that Effi Briest, as a late realist novel, presents a consummate literary technique for controlling the monstrous emergence associated with hybridism. In Effi Briest, this dynamics foregrounds a critical dimension leading to an understanding of formal and social aspects of the novel in the age of bourgeois epic.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1145