A Multi-media Survey of German Children's and Youth Literature, 1900-1945

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Petra Josting
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 267702022

With its research on children’s and youth literature emphasizing its embedding into a multimedia environment, the present project has made an innovative contribution to the historiography of children’s and youth literature. Because previous research had predominantly been restricted to the book as a medium and had thus neglected both inter- or transmedial aspects of children’s and youth literature and the study of participants in the so-called action system of children’s and youth literature, i.e. the role of producers, intermediaries, recipients, processors. Hence, the present research study focussed on individual media, such as film and radio, and their multimedia environment, but also analysed media convergence, the interconnection of medial techniques, offers/content, modes of reception and distribution. For optimal use of the data collected, a web-enabled database has been created in cooperation with the Bielefeld University Library. In this database, the individual media offerings and their players can be charted, described and linked up with each other, including secondary literature and paratexts. In line with the Digital humanities, these digitalized data will be made openly accessible and thereby all results of the project will be available to the public.In the subsequent year it is intended, first, to enter the relatively big amounts of data recorded in other recording systems, because of the delayed completion of the database. Second, due to new findings during the project work, it proved necessary to evaluate and include the special pages and local editions of the radio program press. Third, two additional film magazines will be analysed systematically to enlarge the rudimental documentation of the beginning of German cinema and the controversies during the NS-era. Fourth, the theatre- und pupils’ performances will have to be taken into consideration more closely than originally planned, because of their interaction with radio and film that shows to be relevant in the embedding into a multimedia environment. Furthermore, the theoretical concepts on multimedia systems need to be refined.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants