The Genesis, Ideology and Poetics of the Nineteenth- Century Latvian Novel

This chapter addresses the early Latvian novels of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle as ongoing efforts to establish elite Latvian culture. The principal types of the traditional novel, such as Bildungsroman and the historical novel, the latter also including the representation of events of a relatively near past in the form of so- called Zeitroman, are detected and scrutinized. The context of Baltic German literature is taken into account, and principal transformations in the poetics of the genre, initiated by the rise of the novel and extending over several decades, are discussed in order to trace in what ways the novel genre is being made use of as an important avenue of nineteenth-century literary production.