Adalbert Stifter's World "Saved Unawares"

abstract: In this article, I attempt to reconcile the ostensible tension in Adalbert Stifter's works between order and chaos, beauty and suffering, surface and depth. If the visible surface of Stifter's worlds conceals their human suffering, I argue that Stifter simultaneously hints at the epistemic limits of his own ocularcentric realism. This play between vision and knowledge, repression and revelation, inaugurates a literary world whose visible order is in fact sustained by invisible chaos, whose dazzling luminosity is paradoxically heightened by the persistent threat of the world's darkness.