Part project 5: Germanic Poetry and the Discursive Networks of Andreas Heusler III

Late 19th and early to mid-20th century German-speaking scholarship on the pre-modern North remained highly reliant on the paradigms, discourses and networks examined in the other projects. The offshoots of German Romanticism continued to serve as the ‘Germanic’ framework for scholarly discourse, whereas the philological foundations of said discourse were derived from the distinct practices of Scandinavian protophilologists and their successors. In a swiftly changing context—from a united German Empire to the Great War, the Weimar Republic, and the ‘Third Reich’—the already intricate networks and discourses of German-speaking academia became more entangled in often drastically differing ideological circumstances.

The aim of this PhD project is to shed light on the emergence and transformation of key paradigms in German-speaking scholarship on Old Norse-Icelandic literature during this period. The study focuses on Andreas Heusler III's (1865–1940) philological practices and the establishment of ‘Altgermanische Dichtung’ (Old Germanic poetry) as an influential research paradigm. Working with material from Heusler's estate at the University Library of Basel, this study utilizes discourse analysis, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and historical epistemology to explore the construction, interpretation, and implementation of scholarly knowledge on Old Norse-Icelandic literature throughout different areas of society in the early 1900s as well as its enduring impact.