‘Schauergeschichten’. Literary practices of the emotional expression of fear around 1800

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Lars Koch
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464589670

The project examines how German-language gothic fiction [‘Schauerliteratur’] processes the emotion of fear around 1800. Employing practice theory, it analyses the emotion’s literary objects, patterns and functions as means to scrutinize fear as an aspect of cultural emotion practice during the threshold period. Combining literary analysis with approaches from both the Media and Cultural Studies as well as the History of Emotions, the project primarily aims to analyse how the prism of gothic literature, contemporary emotional knowledge, and medial treatment produces the signature of fear at that particular time in history. A twofold research question arises: What is the aesthetic form of historical fear in literature and what are the effects of literary communication of fear on the emotion’s historical character? Hence, the project addresses three interconnected research gaps: It reads fear in its historical manifestation as one of the guiding emotions in literature around 1800 (1); it strives for a comprehensive reevaluation of the German gothic literature within in the emotional context of that specific period (2) and positions literary emotion research and history of emotion in a reciprocal relationship (3). The project is rooted in fundamental reflections on the historicity of literature and fear as well as in the relationship between literature and emotions. Towards a historical praxeology of fear, it intersects with questions of the cultural dimension(s) of feelings and merges history of fear with a media anthropology of popular gothic literature. With this in mind, the project examines popular 19th century gothic fiction, to investigate which literary techniques are implemented to articulate and communicate fear. In order to achieve a multilayered historization of fear, this project expands the traditional canon of the German “Schauerroman”. Therefore, the corpus of texts will include not only Friedrich Schiller’s Romanfragment Der Geisterseher (1787), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke (1816), and Wilhelm Hauff’s novella Mittheilungen aus den Memoiren des Satans (1825/26), but also mass-produced popular fiction of the epoch. To analyze these texts’ emotion practices, they will be contextualized within and read against both the contemporary emotional knowledge as well as dominant discourses of fear.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants