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The Eighteenth-Century Novel as Media Event

In 1773, Friedrich Nicolai published the first installment of the novel that would eventually become one of the most popular German works of fiction of the eighteenth century.1 Appearing in three volumes between 1773 and 1776, Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker follows a bumbling theologian on a range of circuitous episodes alternating between the tragic and the ridiculous. Nothanker is an aspiring scholarly author who, in proper Sternian fashion, is possessed by a heterodox theological “hobby horse” that he is compelled to share with the world, namely an unusual interpretation of the Biblical book of Revelation that, predictably, arouses the disfavour of church and state authorities (the title of Nicolai’s novel takes its cue from Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [1759–67]). After the loss of his provincial pastorship and his wife’s abrupt death, Sebaldus moves to Leipzig, the centre of the German book trade (and a stop of the first article in this special issue). Seeking to get his foot in the door of the publishing world, Sebaldus wanders “von Druckerey zu Druckerey und von Buchladen zu Buchladen” (63), awed by the material presence of the literary market surrounding him: