The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print

Description

With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane's creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the author's 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other "paper tools," such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned "writing" into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane's creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors' notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century. Cover page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Illustrations Permissions Note on Translations and Transcriptions Abbreviations for Recurring Fontane Citations Acknowledgments Introduction Remediating Copy and Paste The Great Realist at Work, or Writing with Scissors and Glue Compiling as an “Improper” Nineteenth-Century Practice From Compiling to Remixing: An Alternative Historiography of Literary Production On Method: How to Reconstruct a Creative Process Organization of This Book and Chapter Summaries One Media-Historical Coordinates: Literature in the Industrial Age of Print An Instructive Case of Literary Mass Production Rotational Presses, Outpaced Books, and New Reading Habits Reformatting Literature: The Authority of the Periodical The Poet at the Loom and the Compiler’s Moment Two Biography vs. Autobiography: The Making of a Compiler Unwrapping an Early Modern Figure The Pharmacy as Storehouse: Boxes and Material Practices The Editor’s Patchwork of Commonplaces: Compiling “False Foreign Correspondences” Inventio, Originality, and Media Realism: Poetic Features of Fontane’s Compiling Keeping Company with Kolportage Writers and Remix Artists Wrapping Up, or How the Compiler Went into Hiding Three A Living Archive: Generating Input On the Hunt for Material Crowdsourcing the Wanderungen The Concept of Collecting Fontane’s Storage Media Bridging Social Distance: The Effects of a Postal Library Network Sampling the Archive: From Antiquarianism to Sensationalism Material Reading Feats Four The Manufacture of Literature: Generating Output The Agency of the Market: Keller vs. the Rundschau Paper Tools as Interface and the Formatting of Fontane’s Notes Methods of Flexible Textual Production In the Engine Room of Realism: Media Crossings in Fontane’s Drafts Remixing the Genus Medium: Nonlinear Editing and the Realism of the Middle Coda The “Uncreative” Writing of Mathilde Möhring Bibliography Index