Fan Fiction in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Landscape

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-200
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Aesthetic

Chapter 5 examines the reciprocal relationship between authors and their readers who wrote fan fiction, illuminating the aesthetic consequences of fan fiction as part of a text’s dynamic reception. Based on close readings of key texts, including works by once-popular but now largely forgotten authors including Friedrich Nicolai, this chapter demonstrates the potential for interaction between works of fan fiction and their sources. Some source authors responded in footnotes and forewords to the unwanted appropriation of a character. Others wrote new chapters. And some, like Friederike Helene Unger, wrote entire sequels in response to the fan fiction they inspired. The result is a dense network of interlinked texts. This chapter contends that fan fiction gave rise to a unique form of collaborative authorship distinct from the so-called Romantic author.

Characters Before Copyright

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Consumer Habits ◽  
Archival Work

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.

Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Developing Variation ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Transformations ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time ◽  
Variation Process

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

Beyond Rhetoric

2021 ◽  
pp. 322-364
Author(s):  
Danuta Mirka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Multiple Agency

The chapter starts with the discussion of the aesthetic category of “humorous music,” which emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and links it to the theory of multiple agency, proposed by Edward Klorman (2016). There follow two case studies of hypermetric manipulations in the first movements of Haydn’s string quartets Op. 50 No. 3 and Op. 64 No. 1. These analyses reveal how such manipulations act in concert with ingenious deployment of musical topics and contrapuntal-harmonic schemata, and how they affect musical form. The chapter closes with remarks about the role of the first violinist in Haydn’s string quartets.

The Story Continues

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Narrative Beginnings

Just as fan fiction defies narrative beginnings and endings, this book closes not with a conclusion, but with an interlude. By uncovering the widespread practice of writing fan fiction in the eighteenth century, identifying the rules governing its creation, and analyzing the competing artistic, economic, and public interests at stake, ...

Customary Norms

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-142
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Enforcement Mechanisms ◽  
The Right ◽  
Property Regime ◽  
Potential Origin

Analyzing twenty-two examples of fan fiction, Chapter 3 uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production and dissemination of these works. After defining customary norms as an alternative to formal law and briefly accounting for their potential origin, this chapter analyzes each norm in detail. In all, five rules, or customary norms, governed the production of fan fiction in the eighteenth century. Together, they amounted to a customary intellectual property regime comprising rights, trespass norms, exceptions, and enforcement mechanisms. This chapter then examines an exception to the rules for publishers who held the right to publish sequels and continuations. Finally, it focuses on Nicolai’s Joys of Young Werther and Schiller’s Geisterseher as examples of the effectiveness of these mechanisms, showing how they prevented egregious departures from the customary norms.

Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-202
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Deep Thought

The oldest arguments justifying formal analysis of literature, of course, grow out of a longer tradition in aesthetics, one having its roots in the development of a theory of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, to emphasize the content over the form in literary interpretation is to emphasize forms of aesthetic value other than the beautiful and the sublime: to read for the content, and particularly for the intellectual content, is to value a book because it is deep, thought-provoking, and profound. Yet far from ignoring a text’s aesthetic nature, in fact these latter ways of reading offer the possibility for a renewed justification for literary aesthetics, one especially salient given the deep skepticism that formalist accounts of aesthetic value evoke.

Aesthetic Judgments and Their Cultural Grounding

2019 ◽  
Vol 2018 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-281
Author(s):  
Stefan Majetschak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
Cultural Grounding ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Judgments

Abstract At present, the theoretical approaches of Baumgarten and Kant continue to constitute the framework for discussing the nature of aesthetic judgments about art, including the question of what such judgments are really articulating. In distinction to those two eighteenth-century theorists, today we would largely avoid an assumption that aesthetic judgments necessarily attribute beauty to the objects being judged; we would as a rule take a far more complex approach to the topic. But whatever we say about art, even today many theorists wish to ground aesthetic judgments in particularities of the aesthetic object, like Baumgarten, or in specific moments of the aesthetic experience, like Kant.

The Idea of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Michael Bell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Sentiment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Lawrence spoke readily of art and its relation to life but was suspicious of the word ‘aesthetic’, which had been inflected by the aestheticism of the preceding generation. It is nonetheless a necessary term which his thought and practice help to clarify. The idea of the aesthetic has been controversial since its emergence in the late eighteenth century partly in response to the movement of moral sentiment and the fashion of sensibility. Rather than simply reject the excesses of sensibility, the aesthetic condition sought to transmute the quality of the emotion, turning feeling into impersonal understanding. But the cultural war over the value of feeling continued into the modernist generation who sometimes identified as ‘classical’ or ‘romantic’ in their view of emotion. Lawrence mocked such ‘classiosity’ as fear of feeling. This chapter compares him with his major contemporaries and suggests his significance within a broader history of thinking on the aesthetic.

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