The novel as archive in new times

This essay examines novels by Paul Winckler and Eberhard Werner Happel as responses in the final decades of the seventeenth century to newspapers as agent of and metaphor for new times. Characterized by the will to gather and update information and by a preoccupation with risk, these novels project investment in human reflection through narrative fiction, a fiction that relies heavily on the prolixity of male characters. As the essay demonstrates, with the re-ordering and re-presentation through fiction of what was once news, these works offer themselves as bulwarks against the transitoriness, fragmentation, and chaotic accumulation of the periodic reporting of ephemeral newspapers. At the same time they begin to embrace new sensibilities vis-à-vis information and the contingency of history.