The history of the nineteenth-century novel in any Western nation is a topic of immense dimensions, for the novel became the dominant genre of modern Western literature; even today, someone who says that he or she is reading a “book” most likely means a novel. In view of the evident impossibility of miniaturizing this history into a compact space, it seems appropriate to venture some principles of procedure. My purpose will be to suggest trends within the development, pursuing less an orderly sequence than the diversity of possibilities. Thus, the absence of any author or title is not meant pejoratively.

In German literary history as with other topics the nineteenth century begins in the last quarter of the eighteenth and extends to the threshold of the First World War. More particularly than in other national literatures, the German-language novel has a fount in a single author's single exemplary work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795–96), which radiated both inspiration and the anxiety of influence throughout most of our period. The chronicle of its descent, however, has been distorted and even somewhat obfuscated by a constrictive canonization process. No literary history, regardless of its magnitude, can be exhaustive because there is a great deal more literature than can be retained in any form of cultural memory. Canonization is therefore inevitable and necessary, although there is much to be said for not allowing it to petrify, and for maintaining options of inquiry into the less canonized. Even then, any literary history is a narrative that imposes an exclusionary order on the unruliness of evolving literary life.