This research project contextualises and theorises the serialised journal publication of a paradigmatic 19th-century historical novel. We propose to produce an edition of Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm (‘Before the storm’) (first published in the journal Daheim [‘At home’] in 1878) that reframes the novel’s significance through the lens of journal-literary research and media history. Our editorial-philological work will foreground the format conditions of serial publication and uncover the specific temporalities of this particular novel (set in Prussia under Napoleonic occupation in the months between December 1812 and February 1813) in light of the temporalities of its journal publication – temporalities that book editions of the novel tend to elide.
Journal publication is a key but often forgotten (or repressed) feature of the literary and media landscape of the period. Taking the fact seriously that most novels, poems, short stories, etc. were first published in journals requires reading texts in and through these journals’ media formats, where a plurality of authors, texts, and images converge and interact. Literary scholars have treated Fontane as a paradigmatic author of the kind of 19th-century fiction that featured so prominently in periodicals, yet much of this scholarship has only half-heartedly and inconsistently focused on journal-based format conditions, and instead continued to put Fontane and his authorial choices very much at the forefront. In our tandem research project we will take a different approach, namely an edition project focused on the journal rather than the author. Conventional editorial philology does not convincingly address the mediality of the journal and is prevented by its own premises from doing so. Our proposal is to produce a facsimile edition of the journal Daheim – the entire year in which Fontane’s novel was published – that is then interspersed with various interpretative forays.
Prof. Sean Franzel
University of Missouri (USA) | German Studies, Periodical Studies, Media History
E-mail: sean.franzel@college-uaruhr.de
Sean Franzel is Professor of German at the University of Missouri (USA) and holds the William H. Byler Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. His research focuses on the literary, intellectual and media history of the 18th and 19th centuries. His current research involves work on periodical literature and editorial philology, and on German-American journalists and transatlantic publishing networks. He recently published an interdisciplinary study of the Romantic and Idealist lecture that intervenes in media history, the history of scholarly culture, theories of publicity, and Romantic legacies in aesthetic and political discourse. His monograph Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780-1850 (2023) is a study of temporality and seriality in the nineteenth-century periodical. It was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures.
Recent editorial projects include a co-edited anthology of major programmatic texts of cultural journalism from the first half of the 19th century (Cultural Journalism in Germany, 1815–1848: A Critical Anthology, 2025); a co-edited volume on the inventory as cultural technique and media practice (Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, 2024); and a co-edited and co-translated collection of essays by Reinhart Koselleck (2018).
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© RUB Marquardt
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© RUB Marquardt
Nicola Kaminski is Professor of German at Ruhr University Bochum. Her research interests focus on the semantic potential of material manifestations of literature from the early days of book printing to the second half of the 19th century. Since 2010, she has developed a material-philological research approach in several books together with Volker Mergenthaler (University of Marburg) and as spokesperson for the research group ‘Journalliteratur: Formatbedingungen, visuelles Design, Rezeptionskulturen’ (Bochum, Marburg, Cologne, 2016–2022) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which combines close reading in literary studies with the methodology of print analysis in book studies. The work in this research network, from which book publications such as Optische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur (2019), Zeit/Schrift 1813-1815 oder Chronopoetik des ‘Unregelmäßigen’ (2022), Die journalliterarische Leseszene im Spiegel des Modebilds. Modellversuch zur ‘Wiener Zeitschrift’ 1816-1849 (2022) oder Vor Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. Mediale Genealogien der ‘Classiker’-Reihen ab 1810 (2025; in print) emerged, was and is in close contact with international journal literature research, especially the Anglo-Saxon branch oriented towards book studies.