Intermedial Connections in Theodor Fontane’s work L’Adultera

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is one of the most important representatives of the Realist Movement and German Literature in the 19th century. Fontane, who has works in many different fields as a writer provides information about the German society of the period in which he lived in his works based on real events. Fontane shows artistically the sociocultural structure of society from a critical perspective, especially in his Berlin novels that he wrote between 1875 and 1898. L’Adultera is the first novel written by Fontane as part of his Berlin novels and the only one of his women’s novels that has a happy ending. In the first place, L’Adultera the word of Italian origin in the title gives the impression that it refers to a protagonist woman who falls in love with another man and leaves her husband and children, thus destroying her marriage. However, L’adultera is a painting by the famous painter Tintoretto, which is used as the main motif in the work according to the author. In this study, the media in Fontane’s L’Adultera are included and the impacts of these media on the work are investigated. Although the term “media” refers to written and visual means of communication in particular, paintings, music, movies, letters and newspapers are also included in the scope of media. Intermediality refers to the coexistence and interaction of at least two media. Even though its practical application reaches far back into the past, Intermediality has been theoretically used as a method in literary text analysis from the 1990s. © 2024 Istanbul University Faculty of Letters. All rights reserved.