Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 17801850

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 formsthe urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricatureas new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.