Fontes Litterarum - Typographische Gestaltung und literarischer Ausdruck

Typefaces as material expression and aesthetic phenomenon in 20th-century literature forms the main subject of Fontes Litterarum. The essays in the volume are divided into three groups: 1. Consideration of the structure and function of typographical methods in literature and of the possibility of systematising them. 2. Studies of the use of these methods in individual works and larger groups of works, in an author’s creative process and in the context of technical requirements and social discourses. 3. Examinations of individual fonts, characters and printing techniques and of the expression of creative semantics in the hands and eyes of authors and makers of books. In order to guarantee a more complete understanding of typefaces, aspects of other arts are considered as well as cultural and social conditions. The volume as a whole offers a range of approaches to the academic description of typefaces in recent literature and demonstrates that type is not a meaningless carrier of meaning but a factor to be taken into account at a hermeneutic level. The authors examined here from typographical perspectives include Karl Kraus, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, Friederike Mayröcker and Alexander Kluge.