4 - Serial Individuality: Eighteenth-Century Case Study Collections and Nineteenth-Century Archival Fiction

Summary

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.