pop fiction, 1795

"The image of the lazy, fickle reader registered the emergence of a recognizably modern form of print consumption. Authors like Schiller hoped to form intimate connections with active, totally engaged readers, who would labor over their writing in an unceasing effort to enlighten and cultivate themselves. The expansion of the print market confronted them with a growing body of educated men and women who consumed books and journals as a form of leisure activity. They read as much for entertainment and for respite from the demands of work as for moral guidance and other kinds of instruction. The recipe for a popular novel included a brimming cup of 'enlightened' bourgeois moralism, several spoonfuls of domestic sentimentality and romantic adventure, and perhaps a pinch of oblique eroticism. In 1795, the year Die Horen was launched and Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre began to appear, Karoline von Wobeser published a novel with the fetching title Elisa, or Woman as She Ought to Be. The heroine of this tearful narrative is a dutiful young woman who is forced to marry a rake but in the end converts him to her virtuous way of life. Elisa was the greatest commercial success of the decade."

-- Fichte, The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, Anthony J. La Vopa, 2001, p. 276.