Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815
About this ebook
Building on recent work done in the fields of consumption studies as well as the New Economic Criticism, Erlin combines intellectual-historical chapters (on luxury as a concept, luxury editions, and concerns about addictive reading) with contextualized close readings of novels by Campe, Wieland, Moritz, Novalis, and Goethe. As he demonstrates, artists in this period were deeply concerned with their status as luxury producers. The rhetorical strategies they developed to justify their activities evolved in dialogue with more general discussions regarding new forms of discretionary consumption. By emphasizing the fragile legitimacy of the fine arts in the period, Necessary Luxuries offers a fresh perspective on the broader trajectory of German literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one that allows us to view the entire period in terms of a dynamic unity, rather than simply as a series of literary trends and countertrends.
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About the author
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.
