Im Zeichen der 'Reinheit'. Zur Produktivität eines Konzepts in der deutschsprachigen Literatur um 1800

The concept of purity has an enormous presence in literary and non-literary texts in the end of the 18th century. Following the social anthropologist Mary Douglas and other recent studies there can be seen a link between the frequency of the concept of purity and contemporaneous processes of radical change which occur with regard to politics, social history, epistemology and culture. This study investigates configurations of purity in literature around 1800 by the method of close-reading. Beyond that, the results of the literary case studies are situated in the contemporaneous discourse of purity as it appears in different historico-cultural texts around 1800. The focus of the investigation is to understand how literary texts operate with the thought pattern of purity, how implications of purity (seclusion, homogeneity, authenticity, alterity/ideality) serve the game of the text, how the (dangerous) potential of the metaphor of purity is reflected in a specific literary way, how thinking and writing under the sign of purity is subverted or deconstructed literary.