Resumen de Gattungen als imaginäre Kontexte
Today literary criticism contests the ‘Volksbuch’ as a genre since its criteria seem under-defined. This paper aims, from a functional point of view, to explain its historical success by tracing four histories of this genre. The under-definition of the genre turns out as the precondition of its manifold employments. What the different histories have in common is the imagination of the ‘Volks-buch’, which could unify the German nation. The ‘Volksbuch’, the paper will argue, is a virtual modern genre which imagines an anti-modern state of society and literature
