Materiality and literature: an introduction
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Materiality and literature: an introduction Thomas Bremer1 Accepted: 20 October 2020 / Published online: 18 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The field of materiality and literature can be differenciated in two directions. Materiality of literature refers to book design, printing formats and typography. Materialty in literature, however, analyzes the way, ‘things that speak’ are integrated in fictional and non-fictional texts. The introduction reflects the international critical discussion of the field in the last years and situates the contributions of this number in it. Keywords Materiality · Book design · Book history · Social setting in texts
Introduction There are not many areas in literary studies that have proved to be as fruitful and connectable to other fields of knowledge as the area of materiality in literature in recent years, especially in the German- and English-speaking countries. The notion could originally be found in museology and cultural anthropology (“material culture”) and in philosophy (Heidegger’s “the thing”; the “thingness of objects”) and from there it found its way into social theory.1 In art history, categories of materiality have long played an important role. For medieval paintings, Daniel V. Thompson’s 1936 study is a classic (Thompson 1936; see also Kumler 2019). Contracts in the Italian Renaissance determine not only the subject and the type of representation, but also the materials to be used for a work of art; the use of gold and ultramarine is often paid for separately (Baxandall 1972). From a diachronic perspective, the reconstruction of artistic production processes allows the “biography” of colors through the centuries (Pastoureau 2000). And of course the determination of the materials typically used in a work of art at the time of its creation is a central 1
This particular role of the concept cannot be examined in more detail here. In the argumentation of Bruno Latour, an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman (= thing); while for Jane Bennett, “thing-power” offers “an alternative to the objects as a way of encountering the nonhuman world” (Bennett, p. XVII). * Thomas Bremer [email protected]‑halle.de 1
Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle‑Wittenberg, Germany
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criterion for adequate restorations as well as for recognizing (historically younger) counterfeits (e.g. Lang, Armitage 2012). In the antiquity there is an important contact zone for inscriptions and other ancient writing surfaces (Ritter-Schmalz and Schwitter, 2019; Petrovic et al., 2019). As Christopher De Hamel puts it for the medieval period, “No photographic reproduction yet invented has the weight, texture, uneven surface, indented ruling, thickness, smell, the tactile quality and patina of time of an actual medieval book” (De Hamel 2016, p. 2). For all examples of material culture, the discussion is on ‘things that talk’. They may be different—“some of the things in question are individuals, other are genera, some are in
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