Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Property and Ecological Networks in Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida

Nitschke, Claudia

doi:10.1080/00168890.2022.2074269

Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Property and Ecological Networks in Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida

Nitschke, Claudia

Authors

Professor Claudia Nitschke claudia.nitschke@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

In Sophie von La Roche’s novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1797/98), property not only functions as a category that assists the “imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” (as G. C. Spivak postulates for the processes of globalization); La Roche also emphasizes the bioconnective dimensions and the corresponding ethical limitations of access. La Roche’s valiant settlers and their environment are emphatically understood as a holistic, living entity with a shared ecology. A specific form of early ‘global’ property and its (quasi planetary) modification are instructively intertwined here. In view of the ‘planetary turn’, the different layers of La Roche’s complex understanding of property, on the whole indicative of the eighteenth century, are worth revisiting in order to better understand where systemic and scalar shifts, ruptures and/or continuities occur.

Citation

Nitschke, C. (2022). Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Property and Ecological Networks in Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 97(2), 134-152. https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2022.2074269

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 26, 2022
Online Publication Date	Jul 7, 2022
Publication Date	2022
Deposit Date	Aug 1, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Aug 2, 2022
Journal	The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory
Print ISSN	0016-8890
Electronic ISSN	1930-6962
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	97
Issue	2
Pages	134-152
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2022.2074269

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