GOETHE WROTE PROSE FICTION throughout his life; and, as we shall see, he explored the full range of narrative possibilities. In this context, we need to remember that, for much of the eighteenth century, prose fiction in general, and the novel in particular, had to fight hard to achieve respectability. Once the battle was won, the spoils of victory were prodigious: the novel became, and it continues to be, the dominant expression of modern bourgeois culture. And to this process Goethe was a key contributor.

Admittedly, the German novel is not exactly a force to be reckoned with in the company of great European novel fictions, at any rate not before the closing decades of the nineteenth century. For the most part, the running is made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the English and French novel traditions. The English novel begins early to register the shock waves of mercantile modernity and thereby to assert the possibility that bourgeois consciousness is worthy of treatment in the epic mode. Richardson discovers in the epistolary novel the appropriate form for the drama of intense, beleaguered subjectivity; at the more robust end of the spectrum, Fielding justifies the modern novel as a form of comic epic in prose, and other writers join him in not only asserting but demonstrating the combination of entertainment value and weighty human concern that can quicken the pages of the modern novel (Defoe, Smollett). It is a potent legacy whose presence can be sensed in the major achievements of the subsequent generation of writers: Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot. The French novel of the eighteenth century also registers the potent energies of a new cult of feeling (Rousseau, Laclos). After the cataclysm of the French Revolution that voice of inwardness modulates into the urgent articulation of socio-political modernity, which, in novelistic terms, leads to particular attention being paid to the workings of social materiality and, by extension, of psychology (Stendhal, Flaubert), often with quasi-scientific pretensions to dispassionate accuracy (Balzac, Zola).

In this illustrious company, it has to be acknowledged, the German novel is something of a Cinderella. It is informed, as are its European contemporaries, by a bad conscience in respect of the popular forms of narrative art: adventure stories, romances, and so on. It too seeks to lift the rattling good yarn into some condition of thematic weight and seriousness.