Necessary Luxuries

Matt Erlin is Professor and Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Berlin's Forgotten Future: City, History and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany and coeditor of Distant Readings: Topographies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century and German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation.

"Necessary Luxuries is one of the finest books I have read on eighteenth-century German literature. Matt Erlin brings together three sources; canonical eighteenth-century novels are contextualized within the century's vociferous discussion of luxury consumption and this text-context relation is then examined through the range of late twentieth-century scholarship on consumer culture generally. The author is thorough and well read; not only does he include all the sources one would expect from a scholar, he integrates them astutely, so that at no point does the reader feel that postindustrial social theory is being imposed upon proto-capitalist literature."

• Introduction: Guilty Pleasures1. The Conceptual Landscape of Luxury in Germany2. Thinking about Luxury Editions in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany3. The Appetite for Reading around 18004. The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact: J. H. Campe's Robinson der Jüngere and C. M. Wieland's Der goldne Spiegel5. Karl Philipp Moritz and the System of Needs6. Products of the Imagination: Mining, Luxury, and the Romantic Artist in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen7. Symbolic Economies in Goethe's Die WahlverwandtschaftenConclusion: Useful Subjects?Works CitedIndex