In 1809, literary authors were already well aware that they had entered the century of distant reading and writing. As Jean Paul remarks in the preface to his novel Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise (Dr. Katzenberger's Voyage to the Bath, 1809), “Mit den Taschenkalendern und Zeitschriften müssen die kleinen vermischten Werkchen so zunehmen—weil die Schriftsteller jene mit den besten Beiträgen zu unterstützen haben—, daß man am Ende kaum ein großes mehr schreibt. Selber der Verfasser dieses Werks (obwohl noch manches großen) ist in acht Zeitschriften und fünf Kalendern ansässig mit kleinen Niederlassungen und liegenden Gründen.”

This brief description provides an insightful account of the new conditions under which literature is produced in the nineteenth century. Jean Paul, as an established novelist, refers to what the editors of the present volume call a “boom in newspaper, magazine, and book production,” and he provides a quantitative figure for his own involvement in this production process. The consequences of this boom are clear: Not only does it bring about an “abundance of textual material” evoking the “challenge [of] how to read it all” (to quote once again from the introduction to this volume). Early nineteenth-century magazine culture also generates a related challenge: how to write it all (“it” being the large number of “minor works,” or opuscula). But at the same time, Jean Paul also raises the question whether, under the conditions of the new magazine market and the consequent proliferation of many short articles, there will be “great works”—or opera—at all in the future.

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.