Moving Texts, Moving Communities: Emotions, E. Marlitt’s Fiction and the Circulation of Controversial Texts in Periodicals across Linguistic and Cultural Borders in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe

This article studies the emotional dimensions involved in the circulation of literature in order to better understand how literary texts can be detached from a specific reception context and incorporated into others. Using the best-selling fiction of E. Marlitt (1825–87) as a case study, it analyses Marlitt’s place in the German illustrated family magazine Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Bower) (Leipzig/Berlin, 1853–1944), before following her texts to the pages of the illustrated fashion and family magazine La Mode illustrée (Illustrated Fashion) (Paris, 1860–1937). Its editor-in-chief and Marlitt’s French translator, Emmeline Raymond (1828–1902), strongly identified with the poetics of the heart embedded in Marlitt’s texts. When sectarian differences and the experience of the Franco-German War severed the emotional community of La Mode illustrée from that of Die Gartenlaube, Raymond had to undertake a painful readjustment of the relations she had woven between herself, her magazine, its readers, Marlitt’s fiction, Die Gartenlaube, France and Germany. By contrast, the very distance of the Spanish political newspaper El Siglo Futuro (The Future Century) (Madrid, 1875–1936) from the emotional communities that identified with Marlitt’s work facilitated its partisan adaptation of one of the author’s novels, aligning the emotionality of the text with a Catholic media campaign for the re-Christianisation of Europe. At a theoretical level, the article combines Sara Ahmed’s relational approach to studying the emergence and circulation of emotions with relational models of periodicals and translations. Overall, it argues for the need to consider the complexities and interrelatedness of contact zones between readers, texts, publishers, translators and distributors when studying the circulation of literature across linguistic and cultural borders.