German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production, 1848–1919 ed. by Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals (review)

Reviewed by: German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production, 1848–1919 ed. by Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals Benedict Schofield German Literature as a Transnational Field of Production, 1848–1919. Edited by Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. Pp. 336. Cloth 120. 00. ISBN 9781640141001. The concept of the transnational, as Celia Applegate and Frank Trommler note in their 2016 assessment for the German Studies Review of key developments in the field, is of methodological significance because of the fundamental challenge it poses to the discipline's "reliance on the nation as the container of histories, societies, and cultures" (489). As many subsequent studies into the transnational dimensions of German-language culture have demonstrated, engaging with the prefix trans enables scholarship to interrogate movements across, through, between, before, and beyond the nation state, demonstrating definitively how that culture has always been entangled, productively and problematically, with the wider world. For nineteenth-century German-language literary studies especially, these transnational entanglements have also enabled important new critical approaches to decentering, deterritorializing, and decolonizing understandings of German studies as a Nationalphilologie (national philology). These approaches are reflected in nuanced ways in this stimulating volume, which marks an important contribution to the ever-expanding field of transnational German studies. Its introduction, by the editors Lynne Tatlock and Kurt Beals, makes a clear and compelling case for returning to the period 1848–1919 through a transnational lens. It is an era, they note, still "invoked as a model for paradigms of national literature" (21), yet one in which this paradigm's apparent homogeneity, linearity, and coherence is contested consistently by repeated transgressions of its "national, political, cultural, and linguistic borders" (4). The fourteen following chapters then present case studies of the ways in which the German-language literary field was subject to transnational forces, but also already constituted as a transnational field of production. While these chapters are admittedly diverse in topic and approach, an important level of coherence is achieved by the way in which many of them focus on how multiple literary actors (such as authors, editors, translators, publishers, and reviewers) collectively shaped this simultaneously German and also transnational literary field. In many chapters, then, what is at stake is not just the transnationalism of a specific work or author, but also the question of how both were integrated into, and sought to actively engage with the concrete, everyday practices of a world literary market. In addition, many of the chapters speak to each other in illuminating ways, forging intellectual connections across the volume. Vance Byrd's excellent analysis of the reception of Adalbert Stifter in the United States, for instance, not only showcases an End Page 339 act of international transfer but sets out a far richer model of transnational circulation involving multiple market actors, revealing compellingly how "literature—and specifically authors—are made beyond the confines of the nation" (78). Byrd's particular innovation is to simultaneously focus on translation and illustration as crucial features of transnational circulation and transformation. This emphasis on forms of visual culture is then reflected in a fascinating chapter by Kirsten Belgum, which similarly focuses on a nexus of translation and illustration in the transnational marketing and authorial self-fashioning of Ida Pfeiffer. Together, these two chapters highlight the transmedial or transgenre features of transnationalism; concepts then echoed in Caroline Kita's theoretically rigorous assessment of a genre not usually the focus of literary study—the musical program—which, she argues, nevertheless engaged fully with the literary field of the era, and in so doing reflected on, and informed, wider debates on Weltliteratur (world literature). Tobias Boes also draws attention to a visual feature of texts that might be overlooked—typeface—arguing convincingly and entertainingly that these, too, reflect the "global pressures" that the German nation, German-language publishers, and the world literary market were all facing at the start of the twentieth century. A further cluster of chapters considers the relationship between the transnational and the cosmopolitan. Todd Kontje provides an impressive reading of Thomas Mann's Budddenbrooks, which reveals how the application of transnational and cosmopolitan frameworks to the novel not only decenters existing readings but also demands. . .