SOURCE: Sammons, Jeffrey L. “The Evaluation of Freytag's Soll und Haben.” German Life and Letters, n.s., XXII, no. 4 (July 1969): 315-24.

In the following essay, Sammons explores Freytag's rhetorical strategies in an attempt to account for the spectacular success of the novel in its own time and its almost complete neglect today.

It does not often happen, in that tradition of modern literary scholarship that is on the verge of becoming classical, that serious attention is turned to novels that in their time were spectacular best-sellers, but no longer have canonical status. Perhaps we should not always be so exclusive, particularly in the area of the novel, a genre that at times in its history has led an uncertain existence near or astride the boundary of literature and sub-literature. It may be a small symptom of some changes that are taking place in the practice of academic criticism...