The aims of the following study are threefold: to identify a range of works of nineteenth-century German literature in which the wanderer motif is a significant element of composition, to enquire into the semantic function of the motif in those works, and to demonstrate how the motif creates links between literary and non-literary discourses. The focus will be on prose genres, and especially on the novel, since this can act as a highly effective integrator of elements from literary and non-literary discourses, lending it an unrivalled capacity to interpret the discursive totality of its own era. Of course, it should be borne in mind that the novel is not restricted to an interpretive function but can itself participate in cultural change by acting as a vehicle for ideology.

The German nineteenth century that forms the frame of reference for this study is not as long as that proposed by David Blackbourn. Its scope is defined by the discernible presence of the motif itself. Our century opens in 1795, the year in which the first three of the four volumes of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared; and it closes in 1895, with the publication of Wilhelm Raabe's Die Akten des Vogelsangs. However, it soon becomes apparent that the wanderer motif is far more prevalent in the early part of the century, especially in what is often referred to as the Goethezeit, and indeed its prevalence in that era must in part be due to the influence of Goethe, in whose fictions the motif attains a unique functional range.