This paper explores Washington Irving’s influence on the Germanophone realist author Adalbert Stifter. Pushing against traditional accounts of German realism as apolitical and provincial, it argues that these qualities are simply media-based effects. Showing how media and representational practices from the British picturesque tradition informed Irving's, and in turn Stifter’s works, the paper recasts German realism as a movement intent on obscuring its fraught ideologies and its global reach."Please contact Ann Fenton (ann.n.fenton@dartmouth.edu) to RSVP and receive the pre-circulated paper and zoom link.