Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung: A Study of the Narrator and Narrative Strategies

This book is a new interpretation of Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung (1590), one of the most outstanding and puzzling works of German literature in the second half of the sixteenth century. As a greatly expanded adaptation of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), Fischart’s novel has often been misjudged as a translation. Josef K. Glowa challenges this assumption and explores new ways of reading the Geschichtklitterung by focusing on the relationships between the author, narrator, readers, and fictional world in Fischart’s novel. A careful study of the narrator and the narrative strategies uncovers a quantity of hitherto unexamined allusions, connotations, and intertextual references that allow the reader to gain a fresh look at an exciting literary masterpiece most worthy of being examined in its own terms.