Multimodality in German and Dutch Narratives (ca. 1450-1800)

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Against the background of prenational developments with regard to the production of early modern narratives and the precondition that alle early printed narratives are multimodal, the project analyses the multimodality of printed German and Dutch narratives between about 1470 and 1800. Research on multimodal literaure lacks a historical perspective: the proposed project on early modern narratives, aims at closing this gap with the exemplary analysis of chosen European narrative toptexts.The project choses a geographical focus in two language areas in order to counteract the 'narrative of unity' and to investigate multimodal literature surpassing culture and language in an comparative way. For the three chosen narratives, which belong to the ten most poular narratives in the whole of Europe ('Griseldis', 'Vier Haimonskinder', 'Fortunatus'), the project realises for the first time a multimodal stilistic analysis of early modern narratives as semiotic complex works (ca. 230 editions), combining literray history, book history and semiotics. In a diachronic perspective key editions will be identified and their verbal wording, the typography (index, icon, symbol and discursive import), the layout (organisation of the page, salience, linking) and their visual-graphical design (illustrations, processes and participant types) will be recorded and compared in their meaning in order to grasp the multimodal compositional architecture of the texts.The project pursues the following three objectives: 1. the systematic multimodal recording of all printed editions of the three narratives in German and Dutch until about 1800; 2. the exemplary comparative analysis of the multimodality of chosen key editions in the context of the adaptation and autonomizing processes in the German and Dutch language areas, and 3. the comparative presentation of the role and the cooperation of German and Dutch printer editors and other actors in the literary field for the choice and the multimodal design of narratives in a book and two articles.