Summary
The sub-project ‘Optical Appearances’ draws attention to the appearance of various media formats. It construes the reciprocal semanticisation of literary texts and the respective different typographic and material designs of their media as important factors in literary communication and as a rewarding field in terms of a media literature history.
Print products are not published in abstract form as ‘mere texts’ but are dependent on the respective media format in each specific form competing for the reader’s attention. The arena of this competition is the literary market which, as a result of the so-called reading revolution in the late 18th century, but primarily in the wake of the industrialisation of book and journal production at the beginning of the 19th century, is taking on new shape. In addition to the monographic book, other formats are gradually emerging as competing media of literary texts, and they each have a specific form: newspapers, magazines, gift books, anthologies, serial publications and editions of works. Formats that are having a broad impact are, from around 1810, the fashionable medium of the gift book in particular – which has come out of the almanac and calendar culture and is usually elaborately designed –, and, from the middle of the 19th century, the daily newspaper. It is primarily these formats that are competing in the ‘arena’ of the literary public with monographic book publishing, which has dominated the market for a long time. In contrast to what is suggested by the literary historiography based primarily on the Goethe period’s understanding of work and authorship, literary texts (here in the sense of fiction) in this market therefore by no means exist only in monographic form or bear only the names of authors who are canonical today. Instead, these texts appear in a multitude of media formats and in diverse ways.
The sub-project’s object of investigation is what it is that is being traded as ‘literature’ in this marketplace characterised by rivalry and interference between media formats as well as by the respective publics for whom they are competing. It focuses on the controversially enforced canonisation processes within literary history before the (post-) Goethe period, and it aims to clarify how the literature defined by the contemporary market relates to this market in terms of media, how literary texts use their optical appearance to state a position, how they – in their respective specifically designed formats – draw attention to themselves in order to court readers‘ attention, at the same time explicitly or implicitly reflect on media formats and potentially express preferences.
The sub-project will achieve this by presenting ‘multiple appearances’ of literary texts, i.e. cases in which literary texts are published in different formats – in sequence, but also sometimes simultaneously –, thereby demonstrating, via direct comparison, how they present themselves in the form of ‘media statements’ and intervene in the conditions of the literary marketplace. These conditions are subject to laws different to those passed down from the literary historiography initiated by processes of canonisation in the Goethe period.
To this end, the sub-project turns – in synchronic sections and with a focus on crucial issues for the literary public –, inter alia, to gift books such as Urania (Leipzig, 1810-1848), the Taschenbuch für Frohsinn und Liebe (Vienna, 1826-1827), Vielliebchen (Leipzig, 1828-1861) and Aglaja (Vienna, 1815-1832), entertainment publications such as Gesellschafter oder Blätter für Geist und Herz (Berlin, 1817-1850) and the Sammler (Vienna, 1809-1846), family publications such as the Gartenlaube (Leipzig, 1853-1937), and daily newspapers such as the Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne, 1798-1945). The aim is to produce case studies on respective multiple publications of canonised, trivialised and ‘forgotten’ texts, and then to draft, on the basis of these, an implicit media literature history that is conveyed by the literary publication ‘itself’. This will contribute to the project of revising literary history in the light of media literary history.