Monograph

The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print. New Directions in German Studies; 26. New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, July 2019.

Das “interessanteste Fontane-Buch dieses Jubiläumsjahrs”. (Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 December 2019, p. 1)

“With The Fontane Workshop, Petra S. McGillen has written a field-changing study of nineteenth-century realism, informed by contemporary media theory and grounded in extensive archival research and historical detail.” (Press Release, MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, December 2020)

“Petra McGillen hat eine brillante, materialreiche, wunderbar geschriebene Studie vorgelegt, die den Blick auf Fontane verändert.” (Thomas Wortmann, Zeitschrift für Germanistik N.F. XXXI–1/2021, p. 200)

“Nie zuvor wurde die Phänomenologie von Fontanes Arbeitsmaterialien […] so umfassend und überzeugend interpretiert, kontextualisiert und in Beziehung zu seinem “Autorenprofil” gesetzt – einem Autorenprofil, das sich dadurch ganz anders ausnimmt als bisher.” (Christine Hehle, Fontane Blätter 111, 2021, p. 203)

From the back cover:

With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane’s creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence–which includes a collection of the author’s 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other “paper tools,” such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips–McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned “writing” into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane’s creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors’ notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century.

Click here for a book summary and chapter abstracts.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters – Peer-Reviewed

• “’I Was There Today’: Fake Eyewitnessing and Journalistic Authority from Fontane to Relotius.” Journalists and Knowledge Practices: Histories of Observing the Everyday in the Newspaper Age. Ed. Hansjakob Ziemer. London; New York: Routledge 2023 [in press].
• “The False Correspondent’s Real Scene of Writing: Capturing an Elusive Figure in the History of Nineteenth-Century News Work.” Modern Language Notes 136.5 (December 2021): 1032–1049 [Comparative Literature Special Issue: The Scene of Writing, ed. Bryan Klausmeyer, Johannes Wankhammer, and Andrea Krauss].
• “The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm.“ Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Vance Byrd and Ervin Malakaj. Interdisciplinary German Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter 2020, 245–268.
• “Ein kreativer Apparat: Theodor Fontanes Bibliotheksnetz und Lektürepraktiken – eine Mediengeschichte.” Fontane Blätter 103 (2017): 100–123. Abstract [invited translation of “A Creative Machine”, see below].
• “The Romantic Editor as Modern Media Practitioner: The Poetics of Reading in Ludwig Tieck’s Minnelieder Anthology.” Special Issue: Das Erblühen der Blumenlesen. German Anthologies, 1700–1850, eds. Nora Ramtke and Seán M. Williams, German Life and Letters 70.1 (2017): 57–78. Abstract
• “Wit, Bookishness, and the Epistemic Impact of Note-Taking: Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher as Intellectual Tools,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 90.4 (2016): 501–528. Abstract
• “Andauernder Effekt: Medienkonkurrenz und Rhetorik in Heinrich Heines Napoleon-Schriften.” Zwischen Gattungsdisziplin und Gesamtkunstwerk. Intermedialität 1815 – 1848. Ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, Wolf G. Schmidt. Berlin: De Gruyter 2015, 203–222.
• “A Creative Machine: The Media History of Theodor Fontane’s Library Network and Reading Practices.” The Germanic Review 87.1 (2012): 72–90.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters – Non-Peer-Reviewed

Handbook Articles, Catalog Entries, and Invited Reviews

• “Faken.” In Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs. Ed. Heiko Christians et al.,
  vol. 3. Cologne: Böhlau, forthcoming 2022 [invited contribution; typescript; 18 p., in press].
• “Arbeitsweise: Medienwissenschaftliche Perspektive.” Theodor-Fontane-Handbuch. Ed. Rolf Parr, Gabriele Radecke, and Peer Trilcke, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, scheduled for 2022 [invited contribution; accepted].
• “Theodor Fontane: Aus England.” Theodor-Fontane-Handbuch. Ed. Rolf Parr, Gabriele Radecke, and Peer Trilcke, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, scheduled for 2022 [invited contribution; accepted].
• “Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg: Zur Entstehung, Druck- und Editionsgeschichte” [co-authored with Gabriele Radecke]. Theodor-Fontane-Handbuch. Ed. Rolf Parr, Gabriele Radecke, and Peer Trilcke, Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, scheduled for 2022 [invited contribution; accepted].
• “Kompilieren.” Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs. Ed. Heiko Christians, Matthias Bickenbach, and Nikolaus Wegmann. Köln: Böhlau 2014, 352–368 [invited contribution].
• “Per Liste durch den Papierkosmos. Fontanes bewegliche Textproduktion – Beobachtungen zum Fall Allerlei Glück.” Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie. Ed. Heike Gfrereis and Ellen Strittmatter. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2013, 98–109. Marbacher Katalog 66 [catalogue of the eponymous exhibition at the Literaturmuseum der Moderne, 3/4–9/15/13; invited contribution].
• White, Michael J. Space in Theodor Fontane’s Works: Theme and Poetic Function. IGRS Books, 2012. Monatshefte 106:2 (2014): 315-17.
• Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012. Monatshefte 105:3 (2013): 489–491.
• Berbig, Roland. Theodor Fontane Chronik. 5 vols. De Gruyter, 2010. Monatshefte 104:4 (2012): 664–667.