‘Schauergeschichten’. Literary practices of the emotional expression of fear around 1800

该项目研究了1800年左右德语哥特式小说（schauerliterature）是如何处理恐惧情绪的。运用实践论分析了恐惧情绪的文学对象、形态和功能，并以此为手段审视了恐惧作为阈值时期文化情感实践的一个方面。该项目将文学分析与媒体和文化研究以及情感历史的方法相结合，主要目的是分析哥特文学、当代情感知识和医学治疗的棱镜如何在历史的特定时期产生恐惧的特征。一个双重的研究问题出现了：历史恐惧在文学中的审美形式是什么？恐惧的文学传播对这种情感的历史特征有什么影响？因此，该项目解决了三个相互关联的研究缺口：它将恐惧的历史表现形式解读为1800年左右文学中的指导情绪之一；它力求在那个特定时期的情感背景下对德国哥特文学进行全面的重新评价(2)，并将文学情感研究和情感历史置于相互关系中(3)。该项目植根于对文学和恐惧的历史性以及文学与情感之间关系的基本反思。朝向恐惧的历史行为学，它与情感的文化维度问题相交，并将恐惧的历史与流行的哥特文学的媒介人类学融合在一起。考虑到这一点，该项目考察了19世纪流行的哥特小说，以调查哪些文学技巧是用来表达和传达恐惧的。为了实现恐惧的多层次历史化，该项目扩展了德国“Schauerroman”的传统经典。因此，文本语料库不仅包括弗里德里希·席勒的浪漫碎片《爱的灵魂》（1787）、E.T.A.霍夫曼的《夜之<e:1>》（1816）和威廉·豪夫的中篇小说《魔鬼的回忆》（1825/26），还包括当时大量生产的通俗小说。为了分析这些文本的情感实践，它们将被语境化，并与当代情感知识和主流的恐惧话语相对照。

The project examines how German-language gothic fiction [‘Schauerliteratur’] processes the emotion of fear around 1800. Employing practice theory, it analyses the emotion’s literary objects, patterns and functions as means to scrutinize fear as an aspect of cultural emotion practice during the threshold period. Combining literary analysis with approaches from both the Media and Cultural Studies as well as the History of Emotions, the project primarily aims to analyse how the prism of gothic literature, contemporary emotional knowledge, and medial treatment produces the signature of fear at that particular time in history. A twofold research question arises: What is the aesthetic form of historical fear in literature and what are the effects of literary communication of fear on the emotion’s historical character? Hence, the project addresses three interconnected research gaps: It reads fear in its historical manifestation as one of the guiding emotions in literature around 1800 (1); it strives for a comprehensive reevaluation of the German gothic literature within in the emotional context of that specific period (2) and positions literary emotion research and history of emotion in a reciprocal relationship (3). The project is rooted in fundamental reflections on the historicity of literature and fear as well as in the relationship between literature and emotions. Towards a historical praxeology of fear, it intersects with questions of the cultural dimension(s) of feelings and merges history of fear with a media anthropology of popular gothic literature. With this in mind, the project examines popular 19th century gothic fiction, to investigate which literary techniques are implemented to articulate and communicate fear. In order to achieve a multilayered historization of fear, this project expands the traditional canon of the German “Schauerroman”. Therefore, the corpus of texts will include not only Friedrich Schiller’s Romanfragment Der Geisterseher (1787), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke (1816), and Wilhelm Hauff’s novella Mittheilungen aus den Memoiren des Satans (1825/26), but also mass-produced popular fiction of the epoch. To analyze these texts’ emotion practices, they will be contextualized within and read against both the contemporary emotional knowledge as well as dominant discourses of fear.