Two Ancillary Nonliterary Concerns for Literary Studies: Dating the Narrated Time and Understanding the Currency in Agnon's Novel "The Bridal Canopy"

A storyworld from fiction, even when it purports to represent some given historical environment, is not strictly bound to conform to its realia and material culture. It is nevertheless helpful to identify to such realia, or to identify the contextual historical circumstances, especially as knowledge of these recedes in time, and readers no longer can be assumed to possess it, unlike what could be expected of readers’ reception when the literary text made its first appearance. In this short article, we discuss the internal evidence in Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy for dating the narrated time, and as an ancillary subject, we also discuss currency.