The origins of the present volume go back to a DFG symposium in 1987, which sought to address the then current orientation of the social history of German literature. The proceedings, perhaps lacking appropriate focus, were never published, but, to adapt Hebbel's dictum about Austria, the Reisensburg meeting provided a dress rehearsal for a number of important later studies, the most notable of which was Nicholas Boyle's Goethe biography. On that occasion Clemens had presented a paper with Bernhard Doppler: “Katholisches Laientheater zwischen ‘Inferiorität’ und Integration (1850–1914)”. However, in the late 1980s the research deficit in the area of nineteenth-century Catholic literature and journalism was only beginning to be addressed and their article lacked context. Not unlike feminist literary historiography in the 1970s and early 1980s, German Catholic literary studies suffered – and still suffers – from a lack of accessible primary material or pioneering studies into particular genres.
© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2001
