Project Details
Projekt
Miscellaneous Poetics: On the Co-Evolution of Periodical Press and the Modern Novel
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
from 2016 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262766954
The aim of this sub-project is to investigate the relations between the aesthetics of 19th century narrative literature and periodical publication formats during the same period. It will examine how the serial publication of journal texts, their appearance in different thematic and textual series, and their embeddedness within various epistemological discourses, affected the narrative structure of fictional texts. The initial hypothesis is that the increasing presence of newspapers and periodicals on the 19th century mass book market formed certain expectations in readers, which led to the incorporation of various aspects of periodical publications (e.g. serial structures, topical references, and interdiscursivity) into the design of novels and stories. It is not thereby assumed that narrative and novelistic literature reacted passively and reflexively to certain forms of periodical communication, but rather that both the periodical press and the poetics of the novel exerted a reciprocal influence on one another, so that one could speak here of a feedback effect or of a co-evolution. Our reconstruction of this co-evolution will be oriented around the concept of the "miscellany," which, as an open, 'mixed,' and serial textual form will constitute the heuristic starting point for the analysis of the structural elements of periodical publications, which will then be further refined over the course of the project. In methodological terms, the sub-project will consider typical examples of narrative texts published in periodicals, and will examine the reciprocal relations between these texts on the one hand and the various - discursive, medial, or generic - implications of their publication context. As in the research group's other sub-projects, particular attention will be given here to serial structures, the journal format, as well as to the manner in which receptive attitudes are being programmed by specific publication formats and designs. In the second stage of this sub-project, the textual vicinity of the analysed narrative texts within the respective journal issues will be illuminated; this will allow to explore a comparative corpus of previously unknown periodical literature as it will emerge alongside the canonical source texts in the course of our research. In this way, the sub-project aims to offer an alternative to the traditional categorisation of 19th century literature by referring to the media history of literary publications. In this way, the sub-project contributes both to the aesthetics of journal literature and to a revision of the canonisation process from the perspective of media history. In focussing on the serial and interdiscursive structural elements of 19th century narrative literature, it also allows for the extension of its problematic into the 20th century and up to today's media aesthetics.
DFG Programme
Research Units
