Proposed Extension to Complete the 'Critical Edition of the Works of Friedrich Schlegel'

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Breuer
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2012 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 215638681

This proposal seeks a one-time grant extension for twelve months to complete work on the Friedrich-Schlegel Critical Edition. The DFG has supported the project Completion of the Critical Edition of the Works of Friedrich Schlegel for a total of six years in two separate periods of financing, from 2012 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2020. The goals of the first project phase have now been met, and it has been possible to achieve most, but not all of the goals of the second project phase. The cause of this delay is above all a significant increase in the number and length of the letters from and to Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, which constitute the core of the project’s work. It was not possible to predict this increase at the start of the second project phase in 2017. Other delays resulted from the editorial deduction of lost letters, which could only occur over the course of the editorial work and which now, for the first time, has made visible the far-reaching correspondence network of Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel as a useful resource for future research. Finally, the difficulties associated with dating countless shorter billets, which are hard to contextualize because they were delivered by messengers and, among other things, merely served to arrange meetings, could not been estimated and resulted in further delays. These billets, however, grant valuable new insights into the social milieu and daily life of Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel in Vienna. The goal-directed measures approved in the grant extension in 2017 to reduce the projected workload were largely successful in preventing further delays, but they were not able to eliminate these completely. With the support of the DFG, the project Completion of the Critical Edition of the Works of Friedrich Schlegel was moved during the second project phase into a digital research environment, on which it now depends. This transition began with a time-consuming transfer of metadata of all letters from and to Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel from the Access-database previously used into the database of the August Wilhelm Schlegel Letter Portal hosted in Marburg. In the time since, the remaining volumes have been edited using a digital research environment (FuD) adapted for the Mainz project by the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. This environment then creates a PDF as a pre-print draft by employing a LaTeX-Script. The optimization of the research environment and the programming of the interface to print require constant corrections and coordination between teams. These two goals could be achieved only partly. Therefore funds are requested for the further adaptation of the digital research environment and the final programming of the interface for print production. The very advanced stage of the work and the practiced editorial routines are a guarantee for the completion of the remaining work within the time requested here.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants