Description
Book SynopsisThis volume plays on the double meaning of network in German and European Studies: configurations of people, objects, and texts as well as network analysis, the dominant Digital Humanities (DH) method featured in the book. Contributions from art history, history of the book, history, literary studies, and musicology contemplate the strengths and weakness of treating the period 1789-1810 as either continuous with or a departure from the centuries before and after by examining different facets of the longer period 1760-1830. While many chapters investigate German material, nearly all expand into other European cultures and cover important regions, protagonists, objects and constellations of bi-and multilingual life. They intersect Italian, French, and English networks and reach across the Atlantic into New England. The period’s bookends indicate a threshold or terminus for traditions, institutions, and national identities in Europe: marking the French Revolution (and its effects across the continent culminating on the Wars again Napoleon) and at times reactionary responses with delineation of national, regional, or group identities, respectively, and perhaps most pronounced in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna (1814-15). Overall, the collection of eleven chapters, introduction, and an epilogue explores European cultural histories at the turn of the nineteenth century in a nonlinear manner, that is, by accumulating critical perspectives on people, objects, and texts that test the boundaries of narratives of transmission, organization, and cohesion that often mark scholarly evaluations of this period in European history.
Table of ContentsList of figures and tables
Preface and acknowledgements
Editors’ Note
Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz, Social capital, material cultures, reading: German and European cultural histories between network and narrative around 1800
I. Social Capital
Melanie Conroy, French salons as networks, before and after 1800
Mary Helen Dupree, Plappermann’s Wanderjahre: Traveling declamators and knowledge circulation around 1800
Joachim Homann, Luftschiff der Phantasie: Johann Christian Reinhart, Friedrich Schiller, and artistic networks circa 1800
II. Material Cultures
Sean Franzel, Serial Inventories
Renata Schellenberg, Cultivating contacts: collectors, critics, and the public in eighteenth-century German-speaking Europe
Crystal Hall, An eighteenth-century New England library in its European, material context
III. Reading
Nacim Ghanbari, First Letters
Karin Baumgartner, Mapping the nation: foreign travel in Germany 1738–1839
Peter Höyng, A call for a concert of eavesdroppers: Beethoven’s conversation notebooks
IV. Expansive Networks
Matt Erlin and Melanie Walsh, Social and conceptual networks in eighteenth-century German periodical literature
Birgit Tautz, K/Cosmopolit* in Enlightenment journals: of networks and translation
Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz, Epilog: new networks?
Contributors
Bibliography
Index
