Writing Time

Cowinner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures

Writing Time shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. Sean Franzel explores how German-speaking authors and editors "write time" both by writing about time and by mapping time itself through specific literary formats.

Through case studies of such writers as F. J. Bertuch, K. A. Böttinger, J. W. Goethe, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine, Franzel analyzes how serial writing predicated on open-ended continuation becomes a privileged mode of social commentary and literary entertainment and provides readers with an ongoing "history" of the present, or Zeitgeschichte. Drawing from media theory and periodical studies as well as from Reinhart Koselleck's work on processes of temporalization and "untimely" models of historical time, Writing Time presents "smaller" literary forms—the urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricature—as new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.

Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Connected by the Ear and coeditor and cotranslator of Reinhart Koselleck's Sediments of Time.

Sean Franzel's brilliant work brings a disciplined commitment to the archive and the specificity of the material text to a conceptually sophisticated discussion of form and formats. Writing Time moves the conversation on periodicity, periodicals and time forwards in very important ways.

Matt Erlin, author of Necessary Luxuries:

Writing Time offers a uniquely comprehensive and compelling investigation of how new forms of temporal thinking were intertwined with the development of serial publication in German-language culture.

Ilinca Iurascu, coeditor and cotranslator of Operation Valhalla:

Eloquent and informative, Writing Time aptly combines print culture studies, intellectual history, and media archeology to probe the diverse temporal modalities that emerged and developed in the serial publication landscape of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.

Kirsten Belgum, coeditor of Before Photography:

By combining cutting-edge work in media studies with evocative analysis of key literary examples, Sean Franzel makes a compelling case for rethinking how literature works and what its legacy is.