Correspondences of Early Romanticism. Scholarly Edition – Annotation – Network Research

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ulrich Breuer, since 4/2022; Dr. Thomas Burch; Professorin Dr. Aline Julia Elisabeth Deicke
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470517871

The Jena (and Berlin) early Romanticism is considered the outstanding intellectual revolution of young German authors and scholars at the epochal threshold around 1800. In this group, which was as effective and sustainable as it was dispersed and at the same time network-building, both ‘Geselligkeit’ (‘sociability’) and the form of communication ‘letter’ were theoretically reflected and practised. However, the correspondence of the protagonists is partly incomplete, overall of uneven quality and largely only available in print. An (also quantitative) study of the letters is one of the greatest desiderata of Romantic studies. The project aims, for the first time, to systematically and completely record epistolary communication processes and in particular the epistolary knowledge transfer of the ‘Romantics’ among themselves and with other correspondents between 1790 and 1802, to publish them digitally and to evaluate them in terms of literary studies and network theory through the interaction of editing (with a high proportion of annotation), graph technology, historical network research and studies in Romanticism. In the context of a field already well researched concerning the history of ideas and social history (‘early Romanticism’), our efforts will not only focus on reconstruction and accessibility of the tradition of a form of communication that largely determined contemporary everyday life, but will also open up a new paradigm for the study of letters and expand scholarly reflection on the theory and social practice of ‘Geselligkeit’ in early Romanticism and on the role and function of the letter in this context.To this end, the project intends to make correspondences of central actors and those of ‘marginal figures’ of early Romanticism digitally accessible and reusable in open access in a philologically reliable manner; to increase the technical and scholarly degree of indexing (full texts, standardized meta- and register data including pragmatics of communication); and thus to stimulate and conduct itself quantitative and qualitative research on the letters from a collaborative perspective of digital humanities (graph technologies, network research, semantic similarity analysis) and literary studies. On the basis of the letters (especially their meta- and register data), group formation and dynamics, as well as the associated transfer of knowledge, will be systematically explored for the first time with network-theoretical methods that open up and further develop approaches from sociological, historical, and literary network research for the analysis of these correspondences. The starting point for the project is the data already available in the Digital Edition of the Correspondence of August Wilhelm Schlegel (KAWS).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp; Professor Dr. Christof Schöch
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Jochen Strobel, until 3/2022