Werke
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Jean Paul
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Edited by:
Helmut Pfotenhauer
Jean Paul is one of the great classics of German literature. This new historical-critical edition of part of his works presents the core area of Jean Paul’s output for the first time from a consideration of the process of composition; it not only presents the texts in what the author regarded as their final form, but also allows the reader access to versions of the works never previously edited and to preliminary handwritten studies on a large scale. The commentary sets out the rich variety of Jean Paul’s metaphors using previously inaccessible posthumous collections and presents a new view of an author long regarded as difficult to understand.
In this edition, Hesperus, the successful novel by Jean Paul (1763–1825), is for the first time presented in all three printed versions (from 1795, 1798 and 1819). The model used in the edition makes it easy for the reader to reconstruct the compositional process. The history of the work also includes as yet undiscovered handwritten drafts. For this reason, the volumes of text are accompanied by the first publication of the Hesperus manuscript. It is followed by a textual commentary, which uses hitherto inaccessible posthumous texts to help decode the author’s metaphors and their world. The Hesperus edition is the model project for the new criticalhistorical edition of Jean Paul’s works.
Siebenkäs is the first great marriage novel in German literature and also introduced the first “Doppelgänger” with the characters Siebenkäs/Leibgeber. The edition presents Jean Paul’s two authorized printed versions of 1796–7 and 1818 in a side-by-side comparison. The commentary volume will include, among others, the unpublished preliminary manuscripts to both editions of the novel as well as a commentary on the genesis of the texts.
The first edition of the Primary Course in Aesthetics was published in 1804 as Jean Paul’s personal record of his theory of art. In it, he defines his approach to aesthetics in contradistinction to contemporary aesthetic philosophies and as it applies to his own work. This edition compares the first version with the largely expanded second edition (1813), and includes Some addenda to the Introduction to Aesthetics, published in 1825.
This volume contains the handwritten drafts for both editions of An Introduction to Aesthetics (1804/1813) and Some Addenda to the Introduction to Aesthetics (1825), now for the first time in an historical-critical edition. These materials allow readers to follow each stage of Jean Paul’s writing process, from notations and initial sketches to preliminary manuscripts.
This new historical-critical edition presents The Life of Fibel in its 1811 historical version. The volume of commentary presents for the first time a transcription of the preparatory manuscript work for this novel, examines the history and background of its genesis in a detailed introduction, and includes textual commentary that provides substantive explanations and also pursues genetic traces.
A new historically oriented edition of the central texts by Jean Paul has been available since 2009. For the first time, it presents the two printed versions of the "Quintus Fixlein" in side-by-side comparison (Continuous text: First 1796 Edition, with a lemmatized variant apparatus: Second 1801 Edition). The "History of my foreword to the second edition of the Quintus Fixlein," previously published separately, is edited in the same way.
This historical-critical edition of Jean Paul’s works takes a genetic approach, documenting the different phases of the text’s development. Accordingly, this second subvolume of "Quintus Fixlein" presents all of the text elements, starting with the early excerpt materials and initial drafts. Commentary on individual passages uses examples to explain these writing processes.
The Life of Fibel has become the subject of increasing scholarly interest in recent years. At the threshold of Jean Paul’s late works, it explores the potential of the unfinished and also reflects as virtually no other text on the nature of writing. For the first time, this new historical-critical edition presents this novel in its historical 1811 version.
