Petra McGillen Wins Scaglione Prize for Fontane Book

The Modern Language Association announced that the winner of the 2020 Scaglione Prize, awarded biennially for an outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the Germanic languages, is Prof. Petra McGillen for her book, The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print. The award's citation says, "Petra S. McGillen has written a field-changing study of nineteenth-century realism, informed by contemporary media theory and grounded in extensive archival research and historical detail. Instead of focusing on the content of aesthetic objects, she highlights the material processes and contexts of their creation. She shows how Fontane conformed to the demands of the literary market to construct a literary identity that veiled modern modes of media production. McGillen thus shifts scholarly understanding of Fontane from the author-genius venerated by Romanticism to the calculating compiler of the modern media world and of writing from individual creative expression to production line-like manufacturing processes. Fontane's texts, McGillen shows, are not mimetic re-creations of reality but medial creations of a reality effect."