Homoerotic Travel, Classical Bildung, and Liberal Allegory in Adalbert Stifter's Brigitta (1844–47)

Critics approaching Adalbert Stifter's Brigitta , a novella long admired for its convoluted portrayal of aesthetics and politics, often strive to clarify its deliberate ambiguity, failing to see how Stifter composes his text in such a way that ambiguity pervades it at every level. In this essay, I argue that Stifter's representation of erotic relationships can be read allegorically, as a commentary on both German liberalism and the aesthetic project of realism. In Brigitta , Stifter combines political double‐speak with the legacy of German classical Bildung to instruct and discipline liberal readers in the 1840s. He situates liberal ideology within a classical literary tradition in an effort to tame it. In this way, Stifter offers a political vision that is consistent with his literary one, crafting a new mode of realism by inscribing an ideology onto nature and travel that is both inclusive and exclusive, political and non‐political.