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Zusatztext Combining analytic approaches from the schools of book history, media theory, and ‘practice-driven’ examinations of literary production, McGillen’s important study reevaluates Theodor Fontane’s works by focusing on the material conditions of his writerly ‘workshop.’ The book offers fascinating insights into Fontane’s methods of compiling, note-taking, and collecting, all ways of gathering information that anticipate modern forms of crowd-sourcing and networking. Fontane’s Realist poetics thus produce a media-based effect and reveal the modernity of 19th-century modes of writing. Informationen zum Autor Petra S. McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA. Vorwort Uses Theodor Fontane's creative process as a case study to introduce news ways of thinking about the making of 19th-century literature in the German media landscape and beyond. Zusammenfassung Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Awarded by the MLA) With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane's creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the author's 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other "paper tools," such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned "writing" into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane's creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors' notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of IllustrationsPermissionsNote on Translations and TranscriptionsList of AbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Remediating Copy and Paste1. Media-Historical Coordinates: Literature in the Industrial Age of Print2. Biography vs. Autobiography: The Making of a Compiler3. A Living Archive: Generating Input4. The Manufacture of Literature: Generating OutputCoda: The Calculated Novel: Mathilde Möhring’s “Uncreative” WritingBibliographyIndex...
