The age of Enlightenment is famous today for the political and social revolutions it has brought forth in America, the Caribbean and France among others and it is famous for the new boost it gave to literature and the arts. The turn to the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the sciences as new professional fields with expanding canons of texts, images and material collections. Simultaneously, a new social and professional caste of writers, art-workers and public performers came forth to feed increasing appetites for the novel as a new form of fiction, for reading matter in the emerging domestic sphere and for illustrations as new forms of mass communication. What emerges in these contexts is a globally shared idea of “America” and a whole array of new technologies, arts and objects by which readers thought to grasp and command the world around them. In this lecture we will investigate both minor and major texts written between 1770 and 1830 that participate in the inventions as much as in the social and political revolutions of the time.
- verantwortliche Lehrperson: Barbara Buchenau