Comprehensive Digital Edition of Frank Wedekind's Correspondence

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Ariane Martin; Professorin Dr. Uta Störl
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389236467

Whilst Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) is now unanimously viewed as one of the most innovative and most important authors of literary modernism, his work, nevertheless, still requires a great deal of critical attention. Symptomatic of this lack of scholarly treatment is the fact that only parts of his correspondence, which shows him to be a driving force in the wider context of the contemporary European avant-garde, have been published. Of the roughly 3,800 letters written by and addressed to Wedekind from more than 100 institutions in Germany and elsewhere only 1,395 are available. The comprehensive digital edition of Wedekind’s correspondence substantially broadens our understanding of the widespread change and developments that occurred between 1880 and 1918, specifically in terms of the period’s significance for both literary history and cultural history. In the envisaged edition the surviving texts from Wedekind’s correspondence will not only be transcribed, prepared according to best-practice scholarly methods and meticulously edited, but also historically re-contextualised by way of a detailed commentary section. As part of the preliminary work for the project, a pilot project on Frank Wedekind’s correspondence was realised and activated as a beta version in 2015. In the course of the present project (since 4/2018), the technical fundamentals have been updated and comprehensive upgrades to the presentation and research levels have been achieved. The current status of the digital edition under construction can be viewed here: http://briefedition-wedekind.ub.uni-mainz.de and https://briefedition.wedekind.h-da.de. One of the central aims of the conceptualised technical architecture is the user-friendly transcription and annotation of Wedekind’s correspondence. Consequently, not only the edition’s presentation and research layers, but also the creation layer (plus relevant enter fields) were developed entirely on a web basis (a feature unique to this particular digital edition). Whilst individual letters are stored in the usual TEI format, there is no need for the editor to code TEI by hand; instead, he/she can make use of the WYSIWYA editor for TEI, which was developed as part of the present application’s preliminaries. Moreover, the architecture has been constructed independently and in a fully modular manner so that components may function without reference to the Wedekind edition and may also be used for further digital editions of correspondence upon completion of the present project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants