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A study of writers’ anxieties about their work under conditions of precarity and how these feelings leave traces in their writing.
The late nineteenth century marked a moment of transition in German literature: as the reading public and literary marketplace dramatically expanded, writers’ working conditions became increasingly unstable. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory, Ervin Malakaj develops an analytic of "fragile poetics" to examine how writers’ anxieties about their creative efficacy register in their writing. Literature produced in times of duress contains traces of the struggle to produce it. These traces yield important information about how writers navigated financial troubles, growing competition, and unfeeling audiences. In illuminating the formal features of this "culture of concern" in German literature, Fragile Poetics not only advances novel readings of canonical authors such as Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Storm, and Bertha von Suttner but also opens up new avenues to rethink literary history from the vantage point of precarity.
"This is an original study that will appeal not just to scholars of German literature but to any reader interested in understanding how the modern publishing world came to be. Malakaj is well-versed in the literary landscape of late nineteenth-century Germany and has a real gift for conveying his knowledge, allowing even readers who are new to these stories to follow his arguments with ease." — Tobias Boes, author of Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
Ervin Malakaj is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Anders als die Andern and coeditor of Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Vance Byrd); Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies (with Regine Criser); and Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion (with Alena E. Lyons).