Summary
The project is focused on “journal literature” in the narrower sense, i.e. the acknowledgement that the narrative structure of 19th century fictional texts has developed in reciprocal relation with the format conditions of the periodic press. Karl Gutzkow had already established this at the time. On the one hand, in his Forum der Journalliteratur in 1831 he determined that “belletristische Literatur” “vor Allem jetzt eine periodische geworden sei”. On the other hand, in the preface to his novel Die Ritter vom Geiste (The Knights of the Spirit, published in the Literarisch-Artistisches Beiblatt der Deutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung in 1850), he reflects on the fact that the old “ Nacheinander” is being displaced by the “Roman des Nebeneinanders”, in which “die ganze Welt” is accommodated and “Zeit wie ein angespanntes Tuch”. In this sense, Gutzkow had already identified seriality and miscellaneity as key structural elements of journal literature.
Based on these key elements, the project will examine the relations – largely neglected by the research to date – between the aesthetics of 19th century fiction and publication formats within the periodical press. The “Miszelle“ – as an open, ‚mixed‘ and serially structured type of journalistic text – is the heuristic point of departure for the analysis of those structural elements of journal publications which, in the course of the project, will be differentiated further in terms of their terminology. This is already suggested in Theodor Fontane’s Der Stechlin (The Stechlin), which was published in 1897/98 in Über Land und Meer. The novel identifies “das, was man früher Miszellen nannte” as the principle of entertaining narrative. This means “allerlei” – from “Unglücksfällen” to “Anekdoten aus allen fünf Weltteilen” – is characteristic of the journal format and the polyphonic dialogic novel alike.
Methodologically, the project will start with exemplary novels – first published in the periodical press – and examine these as ‘anchor texts’, focusing on their interaction with the media-, discourse- and genre-specific implications of their publication framework. Here, we intend to set out the effects of publication in instalments, classification under different thematic and text-type-specific series, and location within the context of different discourses of knowledge, on the narrative structure of these novels. The initial hypothesis is that the increasing presence of newspapers and magazines in the 19th century mass book market cultivated reception expectations which resulted in the adoption of particular aspects of periodical press publications (e.g. of instalment structures, references to current affairs, or interdiscursivity) into the immanent narrative poetics of the novels. This is not, however, to reductively assume that fiction reacts passively or automatically to forms of newspaper and magazine communication, but that both – the periodical press and the poetics of the novel – mutually influence one another so that we can speak of a co-evolution, with fiction and journals feeding back into one another in specific ways. Based on this assumption, the project will tap into the textual field of the ‘anchor texts’ in the respective newspapers and magazines in order to introduce, alongside the canonical texts, a comparative corpus of thus far largely unfamiliar literature, and in so doing, to offer – in addition to the traditional classifications of 19th century literary history – an alternative perspective on the novel informed by media history.
By doing so, we will contribute both to the analysis of the aesthetics of journal literature and to the media-historical revision of canon formation processes. However, by pointedly illustrating serial and miscellaneous structural elements of 19th century prose fiction, the questions of the project will also be extended into the 20th century and, respectively, into the media aesthetics of the present.