‘Annoncenliteratur’: Kleist, Fontane and the Rustle of Paper

Critical discussions of German realist literature over the last few decades have repeatedly examined the intersection between publicity, audience formation and literary production, especially in the context of the boom of the popular periodical press in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much remains to be said, however, about the specific role newspaper advertising strategies played in the construction and redefinition of literary modes and categories. In a trajectory that leads from Kleist to Fontane, this essay argues that public notices and classified ads from newspapers and journals become, over the course of the nineteenth century, literary subjects in their own right, allowing for new narrative and expressive strategies and signalling dramatic changes in the conditions of epistolary communication ‘im papiernen Zeitalter’, as turn-of-the-century cultural historians have called the era of industrially produced paper. Whereas the ‘Intelligenzblatt’ and the want ad from Kleist’s ‘Marqui...