Consumers, Female Consumers and Consumer Objects: On the Establishment of New Actors and Their Fields of Action in 19th Century German Literature

手头的项目旨在创建一个多视角的文学史，以了解消费者是如何在漫长的19世纪的德语国家中被发明和塑造的，以及他/她的行动领域。这种发明和分析有两种不同的含义：在此期间，消费者首先发展成为经济周期结构中的独立参与者，其次发展成为位于经济学和文学之间界面的虚构人物。工作假设区分了三个阶段：在19世纪早期阶段(1)，可以观察到一种趋势，即消费者仅仅根据他或她的极端来感知，即富人和穷人的消费习惯。从19世纪中期开始(2)，从生产者的角度来看，消费者越来越多地作为一个想象的主体产生；类似于历史学派的立场，它把销售放在其考虑的中心。19世纪末(3)，消费者（男性和女性）的形象在经济学中得到了进一步的巩固和扩展，在这种情况下，边际效用理论将产品的价值相对化，也主观化。尽管消费者日益成为19世纪经济模型的中心，但令人好奇的是，作为一个数字，消费者仍然处于不确定状态。在19世纪末，文学处理了这一空白，并用真正的文学手段填补了它。基于这些工作假设，子项目A提出了一个问题，即认为消费者的经济理论在多大程度上也能够吸引女性消费者。历史学派的经济学和边际效用理论没有解释这个问题；然而，文学清晰地描绘了女性消费者，从而富有想象力地填补了经济理论的空白。文学可以构想出想象的结构，与经济消费观念的抽象性相辅相成，作为对想象设计的挑战。为此，将在比较研究框架中对该项目重新认可的男性和女性写作进行审查。在子项目B中，重点将放在消费者与文学文本中的事物或消费对象之间的关系上。基于事物和人物（部分）身份的浪漫主义思想，这种思想在19世纪文学中的发展将在上述消费、消费对象和消费者的建模背景下进行考虑。其目的是证明，在经济学中制定的商品主观价值理论因此具有激进的，甚至是形而上学的意义。

The project at hand aims to create a multi-perspective literary history of how the consumer was invented and profiled as well as his/her fields of action in the German-speaking countries of the long 19th century. This invention and profiling have two different meanings: during this period, the consumer develops firstly into an independent actor in the fabric of the economic cycle, and secondly into an imaginary figure as the one situated at the interface between economics and literature. The working hypotheses differentiate between three phases: in the early phase of the 19th century (1), a tendency can be observed in which the consumer is merely perceived in terms of his or her extremes, i.e. the consumption habits of rich and poor. From the middle of the 19th century onwards (2), the consumer is increasingly generated as an imaginary subject from the perspective of a producer; analogous to the positions of the historical school, which places sales at the center of its considerations. At the end of the 19th century (3), the figure of the consumer (male and female) is further consolidated and expanded in economics, in this case in the theory of marginal utility, which relativizes and also subjectivizes the value of a product. Although the consumer is increasingly at the center of 19th century economic models, as a figure the consumer nevertheless remains curiously under-determined. At the end of the 19th century literature deals with this void and fills it with genuine literary devices.Based on these working hypotheses, subproject A poses the question to what extent the economic theory which conceives the consumer is also able to capture the female consumer. It is not explained in the historical school of economics and theory of marginal utility; literature, however, clearly depicts a female consumer and thus imaginatively fills the blanks of economic theory. Literature can conceive of the imaginary structure, complementary to the abstractness of the economic consumer concept, as a challenge for the imaginary design. In response to this, male and female writing, which will be recanonized by the project, will be examined in a comparative research framework.In subproject B the focus will be placed on the relationship between consumer on the one hand, and the thing or consumer object in literary texts on the other. Based on the romantic idea of a (partial) identity of things and figures, the development of this figure of thought in 19th century literature will be considered against the backdrop of the aforementioned modelling of consumption, consumer objects and consumers. The aim is to demonstrate that the theory of the subjective value of goods formulated in economics thus takes on a radicalized, even metaphysically charged meaning.