The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (New Directions in German Studies, 26)

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. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the advent of industrialized printing technology transformed the conditions of literary production in Germany. Authors confronted a marketplace newly dominated by periodicals, the first modern mass media. Established accounts describe the relationship between literary writing and the mass press in terms of creative constraints and a loss of aesthetic autonomy. Petra McGillen’s analysis of the creative process of the great German realist Theodor Fontane challenges this narrative. Exploring Fontane’s notebooks and other little-known archival materials, McGillen demonstrates that in response to the industrialization of print, Fontane developed a new mode of creativity: he ran a “workshop” to assemble journalistic writings and prose works from a reservoir of textual snippets and imagery that the author and his helpers culled from the mass press. With an innovative approach that combines material media theory, media history, and literary poetics, McGillen historicizes this form of authorship, arguing that Fontane’s composition practices continued the early-modern tradition of compiling and anticipated modern methods of remix. Comparing Fontane’s practices to those of Keller, Raabe, and Dickens, she concludes that Fontane’s “workshop” resulted in two innovations: a realism that was a media effect, produced with textual and visual materials that the author sampled and remixed on an unprecedented scale, and a model of authorship that reconciled literary writing with mass production. McGillen thus provides not only the first in-depth study of Fontane’s notebooks but also a new understanding of German realism as a period of innovative textual practices. Cover page 1 Series page 2 Title page 6 Copyright page 7 Dedication 8 Contents 10 Illustrations 11 Permissions 13 Note on Translations and Transcriptions 15 Abbreviations for Recurring Fontane Citations 16 Acknowledgments 17 Introduction Remediating Copy and Paste 20 The Great Realist at Work, or Writing with Scissors and Glue 20 Compiling as an “Improper” Nineteenth-Century Practice 26 From Compiling to Remixing: An Alternative Historiography of Literary Production 31 On Method: How to Reconstruct a Creative Process 40 Organization of This Book and Chapter Summaries 48 One Media-Historical Coordinates: Literature in the Industrial Age of Print 52 An Instructive Case of Literary Mass Production 52 Rotational Presses, Outpaced Books, and New Reading Habits 56 Reformatting Literature: The Authority of the Periodical 67 The Poet at the Loom and the Compiler’s Moment 78 Two Biography vs. Autobiography: The Making of a Compiler 90 Unwrapping an Early Modern Figure 90 The Pharmacy as Storehouse: Boxes and Material Practices 95 The Editor’s Patchwork of Commonplaces: Compiling “False Foreign Correspondences” 102 Inventio, Originality, and Media Realism: Poetic Features of Fontane’s Compiling 119 Keeping Company with Kolportage Writers and Remix Artists 126 Wrapping Up, or How the Compiler Went into Hiding 134 Three A Living Archive: Generating Input 140 On the Hunt for Material 140 Crowdsourcing the Wanderungen 144 The Concept of Collecting 151 Fontane’s Storage Media 155 Bridging Social Distance: The Effects of a Postal Library Network 169 Sampling the Archive: From Antiquarianism to Sensationalism 184 Material Reading Feats 192 Four The Manufacture of Literature: Generating Output 202 The Agency of the Market: Keller vs. the Rundschau 202 Paper Tools as Interface and the Formatting of Fontane’s Notes 209 Methods of Flexible Textual Production 222 In the Engine Room of Realism: Media Crossings in Fontane’s Drafts 227 Remixing the Genus Medium: Nonlinear Editing and the Realism of the Middle 263 Coda The “Uncreative” Writing of Mathilde Möhring 276 Bibliography 296 Index 316 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.