Publishing Culture and the "Reading Nation"

Over the long nineteenth century, German book publishing experienced an unprecedented boom, outstripping by 1910 all other Western nations. Responding to the spread of literacy, publishers found new marketing methods and recalibrated their relationships to authors. Technical innovations made books for a range of budgets possible. Yearbooks, encyclopedias, and boxed sets also multiplied. A renewed interest in connoisseurship meant that books signified taste and affiliation. While reading could be a group activity, the splintering of the publishing industry into niche markets made it seem an ever-more private and individualistic affair, promising variously self-help, information, Bildung, moral edification, and titillation. The essays in this volume examine what Robert Darnton has termed the "communications circuit": the life-cycle of the book as a convergence of complex cultural, social, and economic phenomena. In examining facets of the lives of select books from the late 1780s to the early 1930s that Germans actually read, the essays present a complex and nuanced picture of writing, publishing, and reading in the shadow of nation building and class formation, and suggest how the analysis of texts and the study of books can inform one another.

Contributors: Jennifer Askey, Ulrich Bach, Kirsten Belgum, Matthew Erlin, Jana Mikota, Mary Paddock, Theodore Rippey, Jeffrey Sammons, Lynne Tatlock, Katrin Voelkner, Karin Wurst.

Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Details

First Published: 30 Jun 2010
13 Digit ISBN: 9781571134028
Pages: 356
Size: 9 x 6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: Camden House
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Subject: German Literature
BIC Class: DSB

Details updated on 02 Sep 2010

Contents

• 1  Introduction: The Book Trade and "Reading Nation" in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 2  How to Think about Luxury Editions in Late Eighteenth- and EarlyNineteenth-Century Germany
• 3  The Shaping of Garden Culture in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1768-1827)
• 4  Documenting the Zeitgeist: How the Brockhaus Recorded and Fashioned the World for Germans
• 5  The Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and the German Imaginary: The Illustrated Collected Novels of E. Marlitt, Wilhelmine Heimburg, and E. Werner
• 6  A Library for Girls: Publisher Ferdinand Hirt & Sohn and the Novels of Brigitte Augusti
• 7  For the Love of Words and Works: Tailoring the Reader for Higher Girls' Schools in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany
• 8  Thinking Clearly about the Marriage of Heinrich Heine and His Publisher, Julius Campe
• 9  At Wit's End: Frank Wedekind and the "Albert Langen Drama"
• 10  Bildung for Sale: Karl Robert Langewiesche's Blaue Bücher and the Business of "Reading Up"
• 11  The Weimar Literature Industry and the Negotiations of Schloss Gripsholm
• 12  "It would be delicious, to write books for a new society, but not for the newly rich": Eduard Fuchs between Elite and Mass Culture