In order to be perceived as an author, you have to be recognisable as such. In this process of visualisation, images of authors emerge that are produced by various authors and media. Ella Margaretha Karnatz focuses on these images and, for the first time, explores the relationship between authorship, genres and digital media. Using a sociological approach to literature and media studies, she analyses reviews, interviews, websites and social network platforms by Sibylle Berg, Markus Heitz, Cornelia Funke and Michael Köhlmeier, among others.

To the publisher's website.

This volume invites readers to rediscover a form of literature beyond the 'great works' of the literary canon: texts that were sold on streets and markets in the 19th century and reached broad sections of the reading public. This popular 'colportage literature' has long been neglected by literary historians and scholars. The contributions in this volume examine the complex interplay of distribution mechanisms and the communication spaces they opened up, of media formats and the associated strategies of representation. Whether and how new approaches to forms of mobile and popular literature of the 19th century can be developed from this is the question that the contributions address with a view to different materials - including 'Kolportageheftchen' from the collection of the Oldenburg State Library.

To the publisher's website.

The topics of 'authorship' and 'staging' have been extensively analysed in literary and cultural studies over the last twenty years. Several publications have appeared that have analysed selected authors (cf. Jürgensen/Kaiser 2011, Kyora 2014, Schaffrick/Willand 2014, Fischer 2015) or individual media formats (cf. Oser 2014, Hoffmann/Kaiser 2014, Sporer 2019, Hoffmann/Wohlleben 2020). However, there have so far been hardly any contributions in research that deal with authors of children's and young adult literature (cf. Lang 2022, Hoffmann 2017, Karnatz 2023). In this respect, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Anke Vogel also state in the current Handbook of Children's and Young Adult Literature that the "staging of children's and young adult authors [...] is a research gap" (Norrick-Rühl/Vogel 2020, 27).

At the same time, the way in which authors of children's and young adult literature present themselves, how they stage themselves and are staged, which 'brand' they represent, is likely to be of great importance for the perception of the texts and for the readership's loyalty to the author. After all, a separate sub-market with its own rules developed early on in the social system or sub-field of children's and young adult literature. Here, it makes sense to build on common systematisations in order to take a closer look at the importance of authors (see Hurrelmann 1992, Ewers 2012 and 2021, Gansel 2019). Research could also be expanded with framework theories that have so far received little attention in children's and young adult literature research - such as Pierre Bourdieu's field theory or Andreas Reckwitz's reflections on the 'subject' (cf. Tommek 2015, Kyora 2014). Following on from this, it would be worth examining which media were frequently used in the field of children's and young adult literature to generate attention and are still used today. A change can be observed here, which is particularly related to digital media. After all, authors have rarely been as visible as media figures as they are today, and the documented steps of their writing work and the exchange between them and their readers - for example via social media - are so easy to follow. Authors no longer only appear in public via the classic (black and white) photo on the back of the book, but present themselves in private and fictional worlds - such as Cornelia Funke, whose homepage was modelled on her garden and writing house for a long time.

These staging practices create images of authors that need to be analysed in more detail. In this context, the question of which models have emerged within the history of children's and young adult literature (such as the "children's literary narrator", Gansel 2019, 37) should also be examined. Do images of authors in children's and young adult literature participate in the models of authorship that are also dominant in general literature? Are there also poeta doctus or poeta vates in children's and young adult literature (cf. Hoffmann/Langer 2013)?

In this respect, our conference is orientated towards three thematic complexes. We would like to discuss the following questions at our conference:

Practices and images

• How does an author appear as an author of children's and young adult literature?
• What are (typical) staging practices of children's and young adult authors?
• Which staging practices are dominant in different periods (from the 18th to the 21st century)? Are there changes and continuities?
• Which media are used to visualise images of children's and young adult authors? Can media-specific images be recognised?
• Can conclusions be drawn about possible offers of identification with potential readers?
• What 'function' does an image/image have for a children's and young adult literary text?

Book market / marketing

• To what extent is the practice of staging also important in the context of marketing and commercialisation of children's and young adult literature?
• Have the images changed in the course of developments in the children's and young adult literature market?
• What significance do individual players in the submarket (publishers, agencies, intermediaries) have for staging practices and images?

Subsystem / subfield

• Do the practices and images suggest that children's and young adult literature can be understood as a subsystem or as a specific field (in Bourdieu's sense)?
• Are there specifics of national literatures (Switzerland, Federal Republic of German, German Democratic Republic, Austria, USA, etc.)?

The conference is being organised by OlFoKi (Oldenburg Research Centre for Children's and Young Adult Literature) in co-operation with the Swiss Institute for Children's and Young Adult Media (SIKJM) as part of the Oldenburg Children's and Young Adult Book Fair KIBUM.

Conference organisers: Thomas Boyken and Ella Margaretha Karnatz

To the conference programme.

The contributions examine Michael Ende's poetics and the relationship between the author, who was perceived as an author of children's and youth books, and the literary and intellectual field of the Federal Republic of Germany. The fact that Ende endeavoured to be recognised by the literary and intellectual field of the Federal Republic throughout his entire career as a writer is documented and forms part of Ende's discourse in feuilletonism and academia. The strategies and procedures Ende used for this purpose and the interrelationships between these and his literary work are systematically analysed here for the first time. The contributions draw on Ende's literary texts as well as his (literary) theoretical speeches in order to outline Ende's poetics and his positioning strategies.

To the publisher's page.

In his inaugural lecture as a private lecturer, Dr Christian Schmitt presents a form of popular literature that was distributed in the 19th century in the form of small prints at fairgrounds and folk festivals and thus reached readers who otherwise had little contact with literature. Using selected examples from the Oldenburg collection of fairground prints, the lecture will show why it is worth researching this 'literature of the illiterates'.

The handbook documents the current state of idyll research and shows new ways of understanding the 'idyll' and the 'idyllic' in literary and cultural studies. It thus fulfils the desideratum of a contemporary concept of the genre that also encompasses idyllic phenomena in a broader sense. Contributions from various philologies as well as from music, theatre, media and art studies complement the German studies focus of the handbook. They uncover the transnational and transmedial traditions of the genre from antiquity to the present day, test established as well as new theoretical approaches and explain constitutive topoi. The handbook understands the idyll as an effect of idyllising processes and thus presents it as a dynamic and contradictory form in itself. It thus also opens up new ways of analysing contemporary transformations of the idyllic in culture and politics.

Further information can be found on the publisher's website.

Arno Schmidt is perhaps the greatest outsider in German post-war literature. This handbook aims to make his work accessible, to awaken a desire to read it and to give Schmidt the place in literary history that he deserves. It offers information for a first encounter with Schmidt's texts as well as an overview of the current state of research for readers who are already familiar with his work.

Further information can be found on the publisher's website.

Further information can be found on the publisher's website.

Gender orders and constellations of desire form a constitutive centre of the idyll genre and its predecessors, ancient and early modern pastoral poetry. While the gendered dimensions of pastoral have been the subject of lively discussion in English-language research, including differentiated theorising, the idyll has so far received little attention in the German-language discussion of the relationship between genre and gender. The workshop aims to fill this gap and invites participants to explore this relationship in the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus will be on the question of how idylls and pastoral texts construct gender(s) and desire and how such constructions relate to the cultural contexts in which they emerge.

Programme:

8:30-9:00 Christian Schmitt (Oldenburg): Idylls and gender. Welcome & Introduction
9:00-10:00 Karin Peters (Mainz): The untranslatable revolt: Jorge de Montemayor's Felismena ('La Diana') and its European reception

10:30-11:30 Jakob C. Heller (Halle): Shepherd poetry as a stage for chastity in Philipp von Zesen
11:30-12:30 Kristin Eichhorn (Stuttgart/Paderborn): Who gives the first kiss? Enlightenment concepts of love and gender in the pastoral play of the mid-18th century

13:30-14:30 Jan Gerstner (Bremen): Eyes and Ears in Concealment. Das Geschlecht der Beobachtung in der Schäferdichtung
14:30-15:00 Final discussion

The academic workshop is linked to a course and, due to limited space, will take place as a non-public event. Individual seats are available for interested listeners: Please contact Christian Schmitt (christian.schmitt (at) uol.de) by email by 22 June.

Unlike non-fiction, literary texts are mostly used for entertainment, but do they offer potential for social insight? Is literature - even in times that are perceived as particularly crisis-ridden - a means of not only naming or describing these crises, but also of formulating alternatives and solutions? Can literature make a contribution to society at all, and if so, what is it? What significance do literary texts have in our society?

We want to ask these and other questions as part of our series of lectures. After all, the current crises in particular not only raise the question of the status of literature in our society. Rather, the relationship between science and society is currently being re-examined.

With the support of the Universitätsgesellschaft Oldenburg (UGO) and in co-operation with the Literaturhaus Oldenburg, we have invited literary scholars to reflect on the significance of literature in our society and the function(s) of literary theory in the 21st century. We will also discuss questions of social relevance with the writer Roman Ehrlich.

We cordially invite all interested parties to the public series of lectures.

Date: Wednesdays, A07 0-030 (lecture hall G) | 6-8 p.m. c.t.
Organisation: Prof. Dr. Thomas Boyken & Dr. Haimo Stiemer

Idylls have been telling stories of balance since antiquity - but not, as critics of the genre have suggested, by juxtaposing complex realities with an 'ideal world' that denies them. Instead, as the study shows, idylls raise the fundamental question of how equalisation is possible and offer their readers answers that have ethical, social or political implications. This function of the genre is particularly important for 19th-century idylls, which have received little attention from research, as they represent a way of reacting to processes of modernisation without concealing the underlying tensions. On the contrary: these tensions come to the fore in a special way in the idyllic of the 19th century. This study opens up this potential of the genre for the first time with cultural studies readings of canonical and lesser-known texts by authors such as Adalbert Stifter, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hans Christian Andersen, Ida Hahn-Hahn and Luise Mühlbach. The idyll thus provides insights into a wide variety of cultural areas in which modernisation processes have left their mark, such as tourism, the natural sciences and medicine. The idyll in the 19th century thus proves to be a literary laboratory in which the possibilities of mediating opposites are played out.

To the publisher's site.

Together with Dr Anna Stemmann (University of Bremen), I am pursuing a research project that deals with forms of orality(ies) and literacy(ies) in literary media for children and young people. We will be organising a conference on this topic in summer 2021.

At the centre of the conference will be the question of the productive tension and influence of written and oral forms in children's and youth media. The focus will be on the different forms of oral and written narration. Although oral and written narration are categorically different - oral narration takes place in time and is fleeting; written narration is presented on the page and is memorised - the book- and writing-based texts are also poetologically influenced by concepts of the oral. Children's book author Otfried Preußler notes that the boundary between written and oral storytelling cannot always be clearly defined: "As a storyteller, I have represented the oldest medium of entertainment, instruction and news transmission par excellence since Adam and Eve's time - a fact that fills me with pride without making me arrogant. On the contrary, it gives me a certain confidence in my own judgement and in my craft. Or should I say mouthwork? The distinction is difficult." (Preußler 2010, 91) At this point, it is not about the oral effects of an imitated narrative situation, as they occur in text types such as fairy tales. Rather, Preußler assumes an interaction between oral and written narration, which constitutes the poetological core of his stories: even if they appear in book form, they are structurally located on the boundary between oral and written narration.

The guiding questions of the conference are:

• How is orality created in written texts?
• How is orality produced in auditory media?
• What is the functional potential of orality/writtenness in different literary media for children and young people?
• What is the relationship between representation and content?
• Can a new perspective on the significance of the medium for literary and artistic forms be observed in the 21st century, possibly in the course of the digitalisation of printing and reading processes as well as intensified research into mediality and materiality, also informed by edition studies?
• Which medial translation and transcription processes are involved in the production and reception of audio books and other audio texts?
• And what role does the material-medial constitution of children's and young people's literary media play in the production of oral or written effects?

The conference pursues a twofold goal: on the one hand, it is about historical case analyses that examine the interactions between orality and writing using the example of selected children's and youth literary media. On the other hand, it is about a literary-theoretical specification of the relationship between oral and written narration. The aim is to work out the genuine poetic dimension of the interaction between oral and written narration on the basis of concrete examples.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Thomas Boyken
Programme
Conference report