Constructing Interiority in Eighteenth‐Century Narrative Fiction: Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon

Christoph Martin Wieland enjoys a solid reputation as an innovator in the history of the German novel. Scholars have credited him with introducing the Cervantes‐Fielding style with its personal narrator into German narrative. His Geschichte des Agathon has often been called the first Bildungsroman . But he innovated in another way as well: by developing narrative techniques for constructing interiority. This article shows that in Agathon , Wieland employs a palette of techniques to display his character's imaginative sensibility, to reveal the contents of his mind, and above all, to show the spectrum of his changing passions. Reflecting the rise of psychology in eighteenth‐century Germany, the psychological theory underlying Agathon is up to date. Wieland's achievement is to combine existing techniques and invent new techniques for building this psychological theory into the construction of character, and moreover in the context of a narrator‐dominated third‐person novel, where it is least to be expected.