The consumer revolution of the eighteenth century brought new
and exotic commodities to Europe from abroad coffee, tea, spices,
and new textiles to name a few. Yet one of the most widely
distributed luxury commodities in the period was not new at all,
and was produced locally: the book. In Necessary Luxuries, Matt
Erlin considers books and the culture around books during this
period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the
fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates
over the legitimacy of luxury in the modern world.
Building on recent work done in the fields of consumption
studies as well as the New Economic Criticism, Erlin combines
intellectual-historical chapters (on luxury as a concept, luxury
editions, and concerns about addictive reading) with contextualized
close readings of novels by Campe, Wieland, Moritz, Novalis, and
Goethe. As he demonstrates, artists in this period were deeply
concerned with their status as luxury producers. The rhetorical
strategies they developed to justify their activities evolved in
dialogue with more general discussions regarding new forms of
discretionary consumption. By emphasizing the fragile legitimacy of
the fine arts in the period, Necessary Luxuries offers a fresh
perspective on the broader trajectory of German literature in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, recasting the entire
period in terms of a dynamic unity, rather than simply as a series
of literary trends and countertrends."
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