Allegories of Format: A Media History of Gottfried Keller’s Unlikely Oeuvre

Allegories of Format examines the significance of format to the literary oeuvre of the nineteenth-century Swiss author, Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), best known for his 1855 novel, Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich). Malika Maskarinec understands format as the organization of a media object’s relationship to a world of objects and persons; format orders a text’s contents or, in the case of literature, what it represents. Maskarinec focuses on three formats of growing prominence in nineteenth-century media culture: the collected-works edition, the document, and the periodical.

The analysis demonstrates that different fictional worlds, characters, and plots in Keller’s literary output allegorize the problems that specific print and paper formats pose to literary ideals of literature as an art form and to ideals of creative authorship. As Allegories of Format shows, attending to format allows for false antitheses inherited from the nineteenth century to be dismantled--between high and trivial literature, between the singular artwork and mass media products, and between creative literary works and the supposedly uncreative writing practices of office work.

This book is available as an Open Access volume thanks to funding from the University of Bern/Universität Bern.

Malika Maskarinec is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Bern and the author of Forces of Form in German Modernism and Truth in Serial Form.