The present volume has been put together in honour of Sibylle von Steinsdorff and her long record of sterling research and editorial activity in connection with the German literature of Romanticism, Biedermeier and Vormarz. Accordingly, the articles contributed here by friends and colleagues concentrate on themes and/or works from the period 1800 to 1848. They range from interpretations of individual texts to comparative overviews, source research findings and reception studies."

The study examines the entire spectrum of forms taken by the prose poem in Germany between 1880 and 1920, presenting the first comprehensive history of this genre in the European literary context from a perspective angled toward cultural studies and media history. It also engages with the influence of French genre patterns and traces the corresponding intercultural exchange processes between the national literatures of Europe. In its consistent endeavour to regard genre history in conjunction with the history of communication it proposes a theory of the prose poem in the context of literary modernity.

Whether as aphorisms or fragments, thought figures or feuilletons, prose poems, micro-stories or autobiographical jottings, different manifestations of short prose have greatly influenced the development and differentiation of recent literature in German and prove to be especially significant for the evolution of literary modernism. The present collection of articles documents the findings of a conference funded by the Thyssen Foundation. Its aim was to initialize a historical and systematic exploration of this textual field via case studies, constellation descriptions, and development outlines. The articles in this volume are not restricted to the examination of individual genres, be they firmly established or as yet largely unexplored. They also thematize the media-historical preconditions for the emergence of short prose and its text-theoretical implications. As such they supply the basis for a theory of the entire textual field within the literary system of modernism.