2020/04/01 by Sandro Jung · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Freedom of Expression and Defamation #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #German Literature and Culture Studies #Ephemera #Art #Literature #Art history
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/00982601-8218580
openalex publication_date 2020/04/01 · openalex created_date 2020/07/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/03
Literary historians of the long eighteenth century have rarely considered nonbook publications in their efforts to construct narratives of canons, the reception of texts, and the reputation of authors. They have traditionally studied editions, their editors and publishers, and, more recently, the paratexts that provided glosses to help readers make sense of the text. The focus on the "literary" as opposed to "literacy" has artificially demarcated one field of cultural production from a significantly larger realm of print culture where the literary was frequently subsumed by a large body of material that facilitated cultural, textual, and visual literacy. Literary historians have thus privileged the printed codex in the shape of the textual edition at the cost of a complex media economy that engaged with literature and promoted cultural literacy. This media economy includes a hitherto largely uncharted literary material culture that thrived throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. It reflected the popularity of texts and, in turn, catered to demand for such items as chairs embroidered with such fashionable visual media as William Kent's illustrations of John Gay's Fables, porcelain featuring iconic scenes derived from prints illustrating such popular works as James Thomson's The Seasons, Salomon Gessner's Death of Abel, and J. W. von Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, and fans embellished with