Serialisation, Translation, Recirculation, Anthologisation

Strategies as an Anglo-German Media AffairWhile embracing a serial culture, practices of translation, textual appropriation, and anthologisation are generally different phenomena.Their intersection resonates with the necessities and possibilities of the emerging mass market for literature driven by technological, cultural, educational, economic, and not least legal shifts in early nineteenth-century Germany.Cheap translations and reprint 'libraries' of classics and the emergence of periodicals heavily based on transnational transfer of textual and (later) visual material are corresponding aspects of the media revolution that set off in the 1820s, a development for which the exchange between the German and British print markets proves to be crucial.Joseph Meyer, publisher and editor of compilated periodicals and serialised reprint libraries (1796-1856), proved a key mediator.The deep connection between serial culture and the flourishing of anthological formats, this article argues, is rooted in entrepreneurial publishing strategies that explored new ways of literary mediation by dealing with and capitalising on the abundance of print media.