Ideology, mimesis, fantasy

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This study of German fiction about America in the nineteenth century concentrates in detail on thee writers: Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl, 1793-1864), an escaped Moravian monk who came to New Orleans in 1823 and during the 1830s and 1840s wrote the first major German novels about the United States; Friedrich Gerstacker (1816-1872), who, among his many experiences in America as a young man, lived as a backwoodsman in Arkansas and who later produced a large body of fiction, travel reportage, and emigration advice; and Karl May (1842-1912), who, though he knew nothing about America beyond what he could read in books such as those by Sealsfield and Gerstacker, wrote famous adventure stories set in an imaginary West and became the bestselling writer in the German language, whose sales by now have exceeded 100 million volumes.Sammons interweaves his discussion of these three writers with excurses into the emergence of the German Western and anti-Americanism in German fiction.