Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fears around the consequences of reading went hand in hand with the development of the novel in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and these concerns crystallized around the reception of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). An examination of prescriptive approaches to reading and an analysis of how moral fears around aesthetic attachment were transferred from theatrical experience to reading prepare the ground for looking at fictional accounts of reading practices in Wertheriaden — the innumerable texts that reused characters and topoi from Goethe’s novel. Where Leopold Alois Hoffmann’s play Das Wertherfieber (1785) offers a broad condemnation of the fashion for Werther, Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen’s identically titled satirical novel, Das Werther-Fieber (1776) ostensibly condemns the moral arguments for suicide in Werther, but its comic portrayal of a variety of social reading practices points to a more nuanced phenomenology of reading — and how reading cannot be contained.