The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century

[T]akes a fresh and highly productive look at German best-selling novels and novellas written between the 1840s and the early 1900s. It combines sociohistorical enquiry into the history of literary writing, publishing, and reading with a particular focus on 'the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market.' . . . The twelve chapters . . . written by established Germanists as well as younger researchers, are well researched and thoughtful almost throughout. Many are highly successful in combining socio-historical enquiry with in-depth literary analysis. --Dirk Gttsche, * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW * [F]ascinating . . . . In her excellent introduction, Charlotte Woodford draws attention to the production and distribution of literature in the nineteenth century as well as to the rapid growth of subscription libraries. The serialisation of longer fiction was also an important factor in bringing literature to a wider and broader-based audience. All these factors are taken up . . . by Benedict Schofield, [Woodford's] co-editor, and the other ten contributors to the volume. * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES * Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * Handsomely produced and expertly edited . . . . The essays are often fascinating and always informative. The best of them make their arguments against the forgetting of their once-bestselling authors exciting. They share a passion for getting to the bottom of why, in or outside Germany, we know so little about books that were, in the main, not just flashes in the pan, as they often endured for up to a century. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT [P]resents a fresh look at late-nineteenth-century realist ?ction by examining the 'fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market' (1). [D]emonstrates an exceptional breadth . . . . [T]his impressive collection will surely inject new energy into nineteenth-century scholarship. . . . [I]ts unique focus on poetics provides a welcome complement to recent scholarship such as Publishing Culture and the 'Reading Nation' (edited by Lynne Tatlock, [Camden House], 2010). * MONATSHEFTE *

Benedict Schofield is Reader in German at King's College London. Benedict Schofield is Reader in German at King's College London.

Introduction: German Fiction and the Marketplace in the Nineteenth Century - Charlotte Woodford Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Bestseller - Benedict Schofield Felix Dahn's Ein Kampf um Rom: Historical Fiction as Melodrama - Todd Kontje Wilhelm Jensen and Wilhelm Raabe: Literary Value, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Competition in the Marketplace - Nicholas Saul Clara Viebig: Using the Genres of Heimatkunst und Grostadtroman to Create Bestselling Novels - Caroline Bland Buddenbrooks as Bestseller - Ernest Schonfield Homeliness and Otherness: Reflections on Stifter's Bergkristall - Martin Swales Berthold Auerbach's Schwarzwlder Dorfgeschichten: Political and Religious Contexts of a Nineteenth-Century Bestseller - Anita Bunyan Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter: Schauerralismus or Gothic Realism in the Family Periodical - Christiane Arndt Selling the Experience of the New World: Balduin Mllhausen's Novellistic Imagination of America - Peter Pfeiffer E. Marlitt's Bestselling Poetics - Katrin Kohl Bertha von Suttner's Die Waffen nieder! and Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie: Sentimentality and Social Criticism - Charlotte Woodford Taking Sex to Market: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen: Von einerToten and Josefine Mutzenbacher, Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, von ihr selbst erzhlt - Elizabeth Boa Works Cited Notes on the Contributors Index