THIS IS NOT the first time that questions about the “great unread” have been raised with regard to eighteenth-century German studies. In the 1960s and early 1970s a variety of monographs sought to look beyond the canon to consider the entire range of imaginative fiction available to eighteenthcentury readers. Thanks to the efforts of such scholars as Marion Beaujean, Marianne Spiegel, Eva D. Becker, Albert Ward, and Rudolf Schenda, to name just a few, we know more about the broader literary landscape of the period than one might assume, not only with regard to its general topography but also the composition of the soil.

None of the authors of these studies had access to electronic corpora, but they still managed to evaluate an impressively wide array of works. In Der Trivialroman in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (1964) for example, Marion Beaujean includes no less than 46 novels by 27 authors. To be sure, this number represents only a small fraction of the total novels published in Germany in the eighteenth century. Marianne Spiegel includes a list of 1,287 titles (including translations) published between 1700 and 1770 as an appendix to her monograph of 1967, Der Roman und sein Publikum im früheren 18. Jahrhundert 1700–1767. Ten years later, Michael Hadley published his Romanverzeichnis: Bibliographie der zwischen 1750–1800 erschienenen Erstausgaben, which includes publication data for more than 5,000 novels. There is, however, little reason to doubt the validity of Beaujean's interpretations, which aim to classify (sub)genres and trace their evolution, inasmuch as they are based on plausible sampling techniques and corroborated by para- and extratextual evidence.

What are the lessons to be learned from these earlier examples of a more comprehensive approach to literary history? The first and most obvious is simply that these efforts exist. The point has already been made in a variety of contexts, but it bears repeating: synoptic, as well as empirical and quantitative analysis, have a long history in literary studies, and whatever transformations are now occurring in the wake of increased access to digital corpora and the tools of data science, they constitute a recalibration rather than a rupture.

Introduction

In looking over the contents of some of the leading journals in the field of German studies, one cannot help but be struck by the transformation that has taken place since roughly the 1970s. The articles in these journals reflect an extraordinary plurality of interests: postcolonial studies, gender studies, memory studies, psychoanalysis, narratology, and systems theory are all represented, as are many more approaches. In addition, remarkable progress has been made to open up the canon and expand the range of objects of inquiry to include film and nonliterary texts. One finds articles on the photographer Florian Profitlich and the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar alongside discussions of Hermann Hesse, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ernst Toller, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. In one particular respect, however, not as much has changed as one might expect. Regardless of one's position on the theory debates of the past few decades, it seems safe to assert that we now have a markedly different conception of the solidity of categories such as “the author” and “the work” than was the case forty or fifty years ago. This conceptual shift, however, while it may constitute a topic of discussion within the essays, is only occasionally reflected in the framing of the analysis itself. With some notable exceptions, it remains the case that individual authors and works constitute the primary focus of our scholarship. Particularly compelling support for this assertion can be found in the publication record of The German Quarterly, which, although it certainly has a unique intellectual profile and is only one of many journals in the field, can nonetheless be taken as representative of the discipline.

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.

The sense that printed matter was piling up was not new in the nineteenth century, even if the piles were higher. In 1494, practically at the dawn of the first print revolution in Europe, Sebastian Brant for one had pilloried the spread of heresy aided by printers who, motivated by profit, “Vil drucken / wenig corrigyeren.” The total output of 1494 was, however, but a fraction of what yearly production was to become. Approximately three centuries after Brant's complaint (i.e., in the time period of interest in this volume), breakthroughs in printing technologies were helping to fuel another boom, far beyond what Brant could have imagined. From 1789 to 1918, the long nineteenth century, German intellectual life and reading culture were shaped by unprecedented newspaper, magazine, and book production that made reading material, fiction and nonfiction, available to a wider range of consumers than ever before. Nineteenth-century intellectuals, like Brant centuries earlier, were profoundly aware that the availability of texts in print was changing life forever. While some welcomed the new opportunity, others lamented accumulation and overabundance. As reading shifted from being intensive to extensive, even the most voracious reader could not read everything.

This abundance of textual material from the long nineteenth century also presents scholars with a challenge: no individual researcher can ever acquire knowledge of more than a tiny percentage of the total number of literary texts that were actually published during these approximately 150 years.