Publication details
Gab es in Brünn deutschmährische Literatur? Zur Genese und Struktur eines – oder eines anderen – literarischen Feldes
| Title in English | Was there German-Moravian literature in Brno? On the genesis and structure of a - or another - literary field |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Etudes Germaniques |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://www.klincksieck.com/livre/3779-etudes-germaniques-n12020 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/eger.297.0109 |
| Keywords | Brno; Brünn; Moravia; literature in German; Bourdieu; literary field; field theory; 19th century |
| Description | In the paper, I attempt to map the development of the German-language literary field in Brno in the second half of the 19th century. I find three stages of development, which, however, are rather closely intertwined and do not confirm Bourdieu’s (The Rules of Art) assumption that there was a sharp distinction of modernist authors and texts to the older representative authors of the “bourgeois” literature. In the first phase of the literary field after 1848, reading institutionalized as a widespread and prestigious activity. Around 1860, reading clubs with a number of members were created and readers’ - rather than authors’ - magazines with predominantly translation texts were published, often in two language versions with the same publisher (e.g. Buschak / Bušák and Irrgang, Lese-Stübchen and Besídka čtenářská). Authors of this period (e.g. Joseph C. von Wieser, Ludwig Goldhann) recruit from higher middle class, but their plays and novels are widely accepted in the local context and their authors were worshiped. A particular “writers’ literature” starts in the 1880s and is manifested both by collective literary projects (e.g. the last editions of the Moravia magazine, 1880, 1882 or the anthology Deutsches Dichterbuch aus Mähren, 1892) and by the institutionalization of the writer’s state. At this stage, the Brno literary field is already profiling itself as German and works more strongly with the notion of aesthetic autonomy of the text and the autonomous function of the “poet”. The authors operate mainly in the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum). In the 1890s, modernist concepts of literature and authorship came in several streams into Brno’s German literary life, for example through the naturalist Freie literarische Gesellschaft (1892-1894) or the “Musilian” generation around 1900. However, these currents are almost immediately integrated by the mainstream of local literary life, as shown by socio-cultural events or collective publications of that time. |
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