Fontane's Literary Criticism
Theodor Fontane’s literary criticism and essay work, which lasted over forty years – from the early 1850s to the 1890s – are as diverse as the subjects to which they are devoted and the socio-media contexts in which the reviews, essays, miscellanies and reflections are produced or published.
Alongside a programmatic essay such as Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848 (1853), which still serves as a reference for literary historians today, there are literary journalistic works; alongside studies on great authors of the past and present (Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Achim von Arnim, Theodor Storm, Walter Scott, Gustav Freytag, Wilibald Alexis, Paul Heyse and many more), there are reviews of popular poetry and literary fiction; alongside passages of letters, often sensitively devoted to detailed technical criticism, are journal reviews and literary sociological sketches that survey the literary scene of the time (such as Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller, 1891).
The GBA
Theodor Fontane: Große Brandenburger Ausgabe. Edited by Gotthard Erler. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1994ff.
Current editors
The Große Brandenburger Ausgabe is being continued by Gabriele Radecke and Heinrich Detering. It is published in cooperation with the Theodor Fontane-Arbeitsstelle
Editor of the literary criticism volumes
Fontane’s literary criticism is based on a broad concept of literature: The critic is not only dedicated to ›beautiful literature‹ in the narrower sense, but also to popular historiography, memoir literature and literary historiography.
Characteristic of Fontane’s critical work is a media- and situation-dependent style of writing, which takes into account both the specific genres of literary journalism and the position of the respective publication organ in the literary field - literary-critical texts by Fontane appeared in organs as diverse as Deutsche Reform, the Wochenblatt des Johanniter-Ordens-Balley Brandenburg, the Neue Preußische Zeitung (aka Kreuz-Zeitung), the Gartenlaube, the Magazin für die Literatur des In- und Auslands and last but not least in the Königlich privilegierte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (aka Vossische Zeitung).
Fontane confronts the differentiation of the literary landscape of the second half of the 19th century with a decidedly anti-systematic practice of evaluation. Although the ›demand for realism‹ (Hans-Heinrich Reuter) to a certain extent forms the basis of Fontane’s criticism and essays, the concrete evaluation is undogmatically oriented towards the specifics of the individual work, which is measured against its individual standards.
Due to its many facets, Fontane’s literary criticism and essays, as a testimony to a practiced poetics, not only reflect the polyphonic negotiation of realistic writing styles in the 19th century; they also provide an insight into the daily business and the text type competence of a professional cultural and literary journalist and thus into the social and institutional history of journalism.
Fontane’s literary criticism in the »Großen Brandenburger Ausgabe«
In the Großen Brandenburger Ausgabe, all of Theodor Fontane’s literary criticism and literary essays will be critically edited in their historical form for the first time. The commentary, which is based on research and historical sources, will provide information on the background to the genesis and printing history, will open up the extensive literary, poetological and biographical details and will shed light on the fundamental social and media-historical contexts in which Fontane’s texts are situated and through which they are interwoven.
Questions of textual genetics and production aesthetics will be discussed by drawing on notes from Fontane’s notebooks and other collections from his estate. In terms of newspaper and magazine research, the specific character of the publication media will also be given central importance: For an adequate historical assessment of literary criticism and essays, both the diversity and relationality of the ›field of print media‹ as a whole and the specific compositionality and sociality of individual print media must be taken into account. The volumes are concluded by annotated indexes of persons and works.
