Erhan Şimşek: Creating Realities. Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865– 1929 (American Culture Studies, 25). Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.

• Kurt Müller

This doctoral dissertation offers a new perspective on the business motif in American fiction. Whereas earlier studies have mostly dealt with the image of the businessman as a literary figure and the business motif as a tool for social criticism, the present study, inspired by Fluck’s Funktionsgeschichte and Iser’s reception aesthetics, aims to explore the changing functions of the motif between the Gilded Age and the beginning of the Great Depression. The historical framework allows to follow this change through the successive stages of realism, naturalism and early modernism. Taking up Kenneth Burke’s idea that “imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose”, the study constructs a kind of typology in which the successive literary developments are correlated to the socio-cultural and psychological needs of contemporary readers.