Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815

Matt Erlin

Published by Cornell University Press 2014

Necessary Luxuries

Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815

Matt Erlin
Funded by: Cornell University Library

In the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801470431

Overview
Contents

About this book

Matt Erlin considers books and the culture around books during this period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates over the legitimacy of luxury.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

Richard T. Gray, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington:

In Necessary Luxuries, Matt Erlin tells the story of the ways in which German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—in particular the novel as literary genre—reflects, at the level of plot and fictional world, on the parameters and consequences of emergent consumer culture, and simultaneously, at the level of form and structure, struggles to come to terms with its own status as 'luxury' good. Erlin argues that it is not enough to view the discourse of aesthetic autonomy as a reaction against the commercialization and commodification of the arts; nor is it sufficient, in his view, to examine the refashioning of literature in this period as a purely self-reflexive, literature-internal development. By recontextualizing this self-transformation of literature in the discursive field of debates about commodities and luxuries more generally, Erlin ties these developments back into a relevant sociocultural and intellectual context—a context, moreover, that transcends the more limiting confines of German-speaking Europe and extends at least to France and England.

Daniel Purdy, Penn State University:

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations Open Access Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	xi
Introduction: Guilty Pleasures Open Access Download PDF	1
1. The Conceptual Landscape of Luxury in Germany Open Access Download PDF	24
2. Thinking about Luxury Editions in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany Open Access Download PDF	53
3. The Appetite for Reading around 1800 Open Access Download PDF	78
4. The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact: J. H. Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere and C. M. Wieland’s Der goldne Spiegel Open Access Download PDF	100
5. Karl Philipp Moritz and the System of Needs Open Access Download PDF	139
6. Products of the Imagination: Mining, Luxury, and the Romantic Artist in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen Open Access Download PDF	175
7. Symbolic Economies in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften Open Access Download PDF	203
Conclusion: Useful Subjects? Open Access Download PDF	232
Works Cited Open Access Download PDF	243
Index Open Access Download PDF	259

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Keywords: german literature; 18th century germany; postindustrial social theory; proto capitalist literature; consumer revolution; luxury commodities; culture of books; german history and literature

eBook

Published: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 9780801470431