WHEN MARGARET COHEN first coined the term “the great unread,” she was referring to the vast swaths of literary history that remain unexamined by scholars. In this sense, these books are not “not read,” but simply not studied, or studied only by a small cohort of later readers. Indeed, many of these supposedly unread books may have been some of the most popular, and thus most read, by readers of the past. As Franco Moretti's later work would underscore, addressing the great unread is about reclaiming the study of certain types of books that have been overlooked and attempting to construct a more representative sample of the past. New digital techniques of text analysis have allowed scholars to be less selective about the books they study and have allowed them to reconstruct more accurate representations of past literary practices.

Left out of this discussion is the larger question of what it means for something to be “unread.” There are many books, for example, that we have read but no longer remember anything about. Do these count as read or unread? There are also many books (all too many) that we stopped reading well before the end. Our bookshelves are littered with books with bookmarks positioned far from the back cover. Do these count as read or unread? And there are numerous moments when we’ve read a passage but stopped paying attention. Our attention waxes and wanes when we read. What is read and unread in such scenarios?

Historians of reading have long wrestled with these problems. What can we know about what people have read? As Leah Price has suggested, when a book most impresses us, we are often apt to put the pen down. When a book marks us, we don't necessarily mark it. Studying marks, whether in the form of underlining, marginal annotation (or now highlighting), misses a good deal about what matters to reading. Part of the value of reading has been its inscrutability, its capacity as a cultural practice to wall us off from the world.

Reading and unreading might be thought of then as complementary practices, as behaviors that are intertwined with each other.

Our current project seeks to develop new ways of understanding the relationship between the novel and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing by focusing on one of the most popular novels of the period, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther; 1774/1787). With the steep rise of printed writing in the eighteenth century, epistolary novels like Goethe's Werther, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's Julie became landmarks of the new vibrancy of the publishing industry. They were some of the most persuasive signs of an emerging commercial literary modernity. As a fictional network of texts, the epistolary novel came to stand for a new culture of literary connectivity.

There has been a good deal of bibliographic research on the nature of such publishing events—enumerative accounts of the host of adaptations that arose from these singularly productive works. At the same time, there are a number of studies that engage at a more intimate interpretive level with particular adaptations or particular categories of adaptations (although in the case of Werther such studies are fewer than one might think).

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.

On 13 April 1813, Goethe received a small booklet in the mail titled “Einige neue Versuche und Beobachtungen über Spiegelung und Brechung des Lichtes” (A few new experiments and observations on the reflection and refraction of light). It was an offprint of an article that had appeared in the Journal für Chemie und Physik written by Goethe's friend thomas Seebeck, who was now residing in nuremberg. it concerned the question of the polarity of light, which was observable through the combined effects of double refraction and multiple reflection and which had been treated two years earlier in a prize-winning article by the French researcher Etienne Louis Malus, “Théorie de la double réfraction” (1811).

Malus's work would go on to become the single most important influence for optical research for the next two decades until the wider acceptance of Augustin Fresnel's wave theory of light over the course of the 1820s. It had begun as an inquiry into the well-known phenomenon of double refraction, the way crystals such as Iceland spar could split a ray of light into two separate rays, initially observed by Erasmus Bartholin in 1669. What interested Malus was the way the two rays behaved differently when subsequently reflected off another transparent surface.