Description
Book SynopsisMatt 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.
Trade Review"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." -- Daniel Purdy, Penn State University
"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." -- Richard T. Gray, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Guilty Pleasures
1. The Conceptual Landscape of Luxury in Germany
2. Thinking about Luxury Editions in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany
3. The Appetite for Reading around 1800
4. The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact: J. H. Campe's Robinson der Jüngere and C. M. Wieland's Der goldne Spiegel
5. Karl Philipp Moritz and the System of Needs
6. Products of the Imagination: Mining, Luxury, and the Romantic Artist in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen
7. Symbolic Economies in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften
Conclusion: Useful Subjects?Works Cited
Index
