Awards

• Winner of Winner, DAAD Book Prize (German Studies Associatio.

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9780801479403

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In Necessary Luxuries, Matt Erlin tells the story of the ways in which German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular the novel as literary genre reflects, at the level of plot and fictional world, on the parameters and consequences of emergent consumer culture, and simultaneously, at the level of form and structure, struggles to come to terms with its own status as 'luxury' good. Erlin argues that it is not enough to view the discourse of aesthetic autonomy as a reaction against the commercialization and commodification of the arts; nor is it sufficient, in his view, to examine the refashioning of literature in this period as a purely self-reflexive, literature-internal development. By recontextualizing this self-transformation of literature in the discursive field of debates about commodities and luxuries more generally, Erlin ties these developments back into a relevant sociocultural and intellectual context a context, moreover, that transcends the more limiting confines of German-speaking Europe and extends at least to France and England. Richard T. Gray, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington

Author Information

Matt Erlin is Professor and Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Berlin's Forgotten Future: City, History and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany and coeditor of Distant Readings: Topographies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century and German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation.

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