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Written with stylistic precision, The Fontane Workshop is as entertaining as a work of literary scholarship can be. This monograph combines a wealth of archival material with historical background (Fontane’s correspondence-based lending library is just one highlight of many) to offer a new perspective not only on Fontane, but on production practices and media shifts in the era of bourgeois realism more generally.
Written with stylistic precision, The Fontane Workshop is as entertaining as a work of literary scholarship can be. This monograph combines a wealth of archival material with historical background (Fontane’s correspondence-based lending library is just one highlight of many) to offer a new perspective not only on Fontane, but on production practices and media shifts in the era of bourgeois realism more generally.
Petra McGillen has produced a brilliant study, rich in material and wonderfully written, that will change the way we look at Fontane.
Never before has the phenomenology of Fontane’s working materials … been so exhaustively and persuasively interpreted, contextualized, and related to his “author’s profile” – a profile which thereby takes on a completely new appearance.
The titles in Bloomsbury's "New Directions in German Studies" series are not for beginners. This volume deals with the creative process of the great German 19th-century novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–98), and it is as rigorously scholarly as its predecessors in the series—which include, most recently, Curtis Swope's Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 (CH, May'18, 55-3144) and Susan Gustafson's Goethe's Families of the Heart (CH, Dec'16, 54-1616). McGillen (Dartmouth) focuses on the more arcane aspects of text in Fontane's development; she provides a close examination of Fontane's 67 notebooks along with the detritus carefully left behind, which she describes as "paper tools." Other critics have examined authors' notebooks in order to explain their creative process, but few have been as meticulous as McGillen. In order to follow the construction of Fontane's creative thought, the reader will need some background in literary history, theory, and poetics. But as difficult as the theory may be, the writing is transparent, the critical view clear and easy to follow. A knowledge of German will be useful, but the many translations help enormously. The bibliography will be valued by Germanists and advanced students of literary theory. Summing Up: Recommended.
The most interesting book on Fontane to come out this anniversary year.
Deftly combining 19th-century media history and a wealth of previously unexamined archival materials, The Fontane Workshop offers a fresh and fascinating new interpretation of a canonical author and a key moment in German literary history. Recognizing Fontane as the compiler he was not only transforms our understanding of his authorship and the sources of his unique success, but also invites us to reconsider more generally the complexities of literary production in the industrial age of print.
Until now, Fontane’s novels have barely ever been considered in light of the process by which they came to be written. The rubric of ‘poetic realism’ defined the horizon of expectations and obscured the view of the workshop in which the work took shape. In her fascinating study, Petra McGillen now introduces us to Fontane the manufacturer, collector of cuttings, maker of lists, cut-and-paste raconteur, remix artist, and media wizard.
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.
Petra S. McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.
Written with stylistic precision, The Fontane Workshop is as entertaining as a work of literary scholarship can be. This monograph combines a wealth of archival material with historical background (Fontane’s correspondence-based lending library is just one highlight of many) to offer a new perspective not only on Fontane, but on production practices and media shifts in the era of bourgeois realism more generally.
Petra McGillen has produced a brilliant study, rich in material and wonderfully written, that will change the way we look at Fontane.
Never before has the phenomenology of Fontane’s working materials … been so exhaustively and persuasively interpreted, contextualized, and related to his “author’s profile” – a profile which thereby takes on a completely new appearance.
The titles in Bloomsbury's "New Directions in German Studies" series are not for beginners. This volume deals with the creative process of the great German 19th-century novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–98), and it is as rigorously scholarly as its predecessors in the series—which include, most recently, Curtis Swope's Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 (CH, May'18, 55-3144) and Susan Gustafson's Goethe's Families of the Heart (CH, Dec'16, 54-1616). McGillen (Dartmouth) focuses on the more arcane aspects of text in Fontane's development; she provides a close examination of Fontane's 67 notebooks along with the detritus carefully left behind, which she describes as "paper tools." Other critics have examined authors' notebooks in order to explain their creative process, but few have been as meticulous as McGillen. In order to follow the construction of Fontane's creative thought, the reader will need some background in literary history, theory, and poetics. But as difficult as the theory may be, the writing is transparent, the critical view clear and easy to follow. A knowledge of German will be useful, but the many translations help enormously. The bibliography will be valued by Germanists and advanced students of literary theory. Summing Up: Recommended.
The most interesting book on Fontane to come out this anniversary year.
Deftly combining 19th-century media history and a wealth of previously unexamined archival materials, The Fontane Workshop offers a fresh and fascinating new interpretation of a canonical author and a key moment in German literary history. Recognizing Fontane as the compiler he was not only transforms our understanding of his authorship and the sources of his unique success, but also invites us to reconsider more generally the complexities of literary production in the industrial age of print.
Until now, Fontane’s novels have barely ever been considered in light of the process by which they came to be written. The rubric of ‘poetic realism’ defined the horizon of expectations and obscured the view of the workshop in which the work took shape. In her fascinating study, Petra McGillen now introduces us to Fontane the manufacturer, collector of cuttings, maker of lists, cut-and-paste raconteur, remix artist, and media wizard.
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.
Petra S. McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.