Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction

"Writing the Mountains reveals how landscape and discourses of environmental formation impress themselves on the literary imagination and argues that mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate new aesthetic and narrative forms. Through close readings of several canonical works by German, Austrian, and Swiss writers in which the mountains are depicted as unknowable, labyrinthine, or mercurial, Klenner uncovers the surprising transformations that landscape and the material environment can enact on the subjects within a story and how that story is told. Writing the Mountains claims that the environment's mutability in fact demands a poetics that can account for shifting forms"--