Reading to Consume: Fashionable Receptions of Literature in Germany, 1774-1816

This dissertation examines the intersection of late eighteenth-century literary and fashion discourses using a reader-response model which stipulates that fashionable emulation of literary texts constitutes a meaningful component of the reader's interpretative engagement with the literary text. This study breaks with the traditional sociological account of fashionable consumption which argues that fashion culture is motived by class emulation. Instead, this study posits that the eighteenth-century courtly fashion semiotic, within which luxury goods signified social status, was superceded in the late eighteenth-century by a bourgeois semiotic system which read clothes and domestic decorations as signs of individual character and moral worth. Chapter One argues that the fashion discourse was an important component of the bourgeois public sphere by demonstrating the interrelationship between the rise in novel reading at the end of the century and the spread of bourgeois fashion in Germany. This chapter also analyzes Enlightenment attempts to regulate reading and fashion among women as a central moment in the formation of the public sphere. Chapter Two argues that enthusiastic eighteenth-century reception of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and the literary character's own fetishization of clothing were predicated upon sentimental reading strategies. The Werther fashion demonstrates that the bourgeois fashion semiotic was based upon the recognition of intertextual relations between fashion objects and other cultural discourses. Chapters Three and Four examine the Enlightenment ideology of the leading eighteenth-century German fashion periodical, Das Journal des Luxus und der Moden. This extremely popular journal instructed readers to interpret fashions and luxury goods as signs of an individual's class, gender, and national identity. Chapter Four discusses the voyeruistic fetishization of the female body and the masculine renunciation of all fashion implicit in the bourgeois fashion semiotic. In Chapter Five E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Nussknacker und Mausekonig" is interpreted as a highly self-conscious and ironic narrative demonstration of how identificatory reading strategy motivated readers to emulate in their own domestic environment their experience of a text's fictional reality. The figures within Hoffmann's story reenact the reception process typical of enthusiastic readers of Goethe's Werther and the Journal des Luxus und der Moden.