By using the phrase “reading Stifter in America” as the title of this essay, I am employing shorthand to explore a rich textual history of Adalbert Stifter's (1805–68) work in the United States. The question of his readership underlines how national and linguistic book trades coincide with cultural politics inside and outside of Europe. As has been discussed in previous scholarship, the United States has been an important market for literature in the original German and in translation since the late eighteenth century. Publishers wanted to make money—whether by selling off inventory from Europe, by reprinting, or by producing new editions in Milwaukee or New York—and typically were less invested in the idea of a nation-state. For their part, readers on both sides of the Atlantic were eager to buy publications that were read widely internationally and in translation. The acquisition of these printed editions of Stifter's works for American private collections, public libraries, and schools connected Stifter-Leser to society and politics in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, and Linz from the mid-nineteenth century onward and proved constitutive of American material and reading culture as well.

Rather than turn to the publication history of editions intended for professional readers, such as collected works and critical editions, I look in this essay at a wider variety of textual formats to address Stifter's place in American reading culture. Drawing upon André Lefevere's and Karen Emmerich's insights on the textual reconfigurations of works, I describe a situation in which familiarity with this author's oeuvre was gained through summaries, excerpts, translations, illustrations, and other reconfigurations and remediations found in textbooks, anthologies, trade publications, and newspaper reviews. Emmerich proposes that these forms of proliferation cast doubt on myths of textual stability or fixity. Simply put, works appear as a host of material texts that contradict any notion of a stable “original.”

Stifter's Bergkristall (1845/1853; Rock Crystal, 1857), a tale about two children losing their way on a snowy mountain pass, can serve as an example. “Der heilige Abend” (Christmas Eve), an early version that appeared in installments in the journal Die Gegenwart on December 20–27, 1845, and book editions were met with approval from critics and general readers in Vienna and in the English-language press.