Robert Seethaler Ein ganzes Leben – a Heimat Novel between Naturalism and Ecocriticism?

This essay is based on Robert Seethaler's novel A Whole Life (Ein ganzes Leben). At the centre of the novel is the main character Andreas Egger and the fictional story describes his long life in a village in the Austrian mountains in the twentieth century. The main character's relationship to, perception of, and interaction with nature is the basis of the thesis as well as how the natural world constituted a place for a variety of interests at the time. Close reading is the method used for the analysis. The aim of this work is to investigate, based on previous research, how the concept of Heimat is illustrated in the text and which characteristics from naturalistic literature are used to emphasise the text's ecocritical perspective