The circulation and reception of Carl Franz van der Velde's historical novels in the 19th century

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the circulation and reception of the historical novels written by the German-speaking author Carl Franz van der Velde (1779-1824), in order to find evidence of where these books circulated and how they were read by German literary critics in the nineteenth century, thus contributing to the studies on the History of Books and Reading. The corpus of the research is composed of research based on worldwide libraries' catalogs, critics evaluations published in two German literary periodicals – die Leipziger Literaturzeitung (1800-1833) and die Jenaische Allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1804-1841) – and Brazilian library catalogs and newspaper advertisements available on the Brazilian National Library website. In the analysis, three main aspects are considered: how many editions and translations van der Velde's novels had in the nineteenth century, which criteria were used to evaluate his books and how was their circulation in Brazil. Through this analysis, it is possible to conclude that van der Velde's works circulated widely in different countries, including Brazil, and were mostly positively evaluated in literary newspapers, thus providing information about the relevance and distribution of the German-language historical novel, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century.