Publishing Culture and the "Reading Nation": German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 76) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571134026 ISBN 13: 9781571134028

Publisher: Camden House, 2010

Synopsis

Over the long nineteenth century, German book publishing experienced an unprecedented boom, outstripping by 1910 all other Western nations. Responding to the spread of literacy, publishers found new marketing methods and recalibrated their relationships to authors. Technical innovations made books for a range of budgets possible. Yearbooks, encyclopedias, and boxed sets also multiplied. A renewed interest in connoisseurship meant that books signified taste and affiliation. While reading could be a group activity, the splintering of the publishing industry into niche markets made it seem an ever-more private and individualistic affair, promising variously self-help, information, Bildung, moral edification, and titillation. The essays in this volume examine what Robert Darnton has termed the "communications circuit": the life-cycle of the book as a convergence of complex cultural, social, and economic phenomena. In examining facets of the lives of select books from the late 1780s to the early 1930s that Germans actually read, the essays present a complex and nuanced picture of writing, publishing, and reading in the shadow of nation building and class formation, and suggest how the analysis of texts and the study of books can inform one another. Contributors: Jennifer Askey, Ulrich Bach, Kirsten Belgum, Matthew Erlin, Jana Mikota, Mary Paddock, Theodore Rippey, Jeffrey Sammons, Lynne Tatlock, Katrin Voelkner, Karin Wurst. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

About this title

About the Author:

Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Review:

I)nstructive and salutary in the way it takes us . . . beyond our usual preoccupations with individual authors and their text-writing and invites us to consider aspects of the publishing context . . . . (I)nformative, memorable, and in many aspects enlightening. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW It is genuinely refreshing to encounter a study that redirects the attention of German Studies to the central importance of material culture. . . . The essays are of uniformly high quality and offer a wealth of information. . . . German Studies should pay more attention to the issues Tatlock's volume raises. Buy the book. It is money well spent. GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW A wonderful addition to a field straddling both literary and historical scholarship. . . . Provides a rich, multi-faceted view of the publishing world as well as the authors' and readers' worlds in the long nineteenth century. WOMEN IN GERMAN REVIEWS Taken together, the essays in this fascinating book remind us that behind Germany's sense of Bildungsauftrag . . . lies an impressive publishing history. JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES

About this edition

• Publisher: Camden House
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1571134026
• ISBN 13: 9781571134028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356
• Editor: Tatlock Lynne