speaking about himself in the third person as he composes his Lebenslauf, jakob von Gunten declares audaciously, "er hat sich entschlossen, gänzlich von aller hochmütigen tradition abzufallen. er will, daß das leben ihn erziehe, nicht erbliche oder irgend adlige Grundsätze" (51). the eponymous adolescent protagonist of robert Walser's 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten seeks to escape his own noble lineage by running away from home and severing all ties with his family. in doing so, he effectively orphans himself. yet instead of being forced into an orphanage like his literary predecessors, jakob voluntarily joins the institut Benjamenta, a school that trains servants. claiming to launch his "selbsterziehungspläne," he aims to jettison his inherited status in a dramatic gesture of self-formation and self-determination (69). as the star pupil of this authoritarian institute, jakob seeks discipline and severity as foils for developing his newfound autonomy, which, once again renders him unwittingly privileged.this article enlists Walser's text in order to rethink György lukács's account, in his essay Die Theorie des Romans, of the novel as the descendant of the epic in a world abandoned by God. in lukácsian terms, the novel is a homeless form-what i call an orphan genre-cut off from its epic predecessors and the attendant security, familiarity, and totality of the epic world. the nineteenth-century european novel focused on the fate of the abandoned child or orphan, who symbolized the vulnerability of the lone individual facing a rapidly modernizing industrial society. i read this thematic fixation as the nineteenth-century novel's self-referential attempt to come to terms with its own abandonment as a literary genre.conceptualizing the genre of the orphan novel, this article critiques lukács's theory of the novel in order to reexamine the modernist novel's conflicted relationship with its own literary genealogy. My meta-hermeneutical reading not only interprets lukács's interpretative theory through the form it is meant to elucidate (the novel), but also helps to close its gaps. Whereas lukács locates the genesis of the novel in homelessness and the loss of immanence, my analysis of his Die Theorie des Romans draws on a reading of Walser to grant the novel as a genre more agency and self-determination. in contrast to his hapless nineteenth-century progenitors, jakob von Gunten declares himself an orphan by voluntarily relinquishing his priv-309The German Quarterly 95.3 (summer 2022) ©2022, american association of teachers of German
