A Creative Machine: The Media History of Theodor Fontane's Library Network and Reading Practices

Abstract

This article proposes a new understanding of Theodor Fontane's reading techniques in the context of nineteenth-century textual practices. On the basis of Fontane's unpublished notebooks and other sources, the article reconstructs Fontane's management of a postal library network that supplied him with a ceaseless influx of materials from both highbrow and lowbrow culture. Analyzing the reading practices with which he traversed this variegated overabundance of material, the article contends that the virtuosic technique of “brutal reading” enabled Fontane to break textual sources down into discrete passages that became available for creative recombination for his own writing process. The article rebuts conventional approaches in Fontane scholarship that focus on his reading of individual authors and their influence, arguing that the question of how Fontane read is far more important than the question of what he read.