Book launch: Fugitive Forms, w. Jonas Teupert

Friday 16 October, 4:30pm-6pm
The Clyde Hotel
385 Cardigan St, Carlton

Please join us for the launch of Jonas Teupert's Fugitive Forms: Poetics of Displacement in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2026). Andrew Benjamin and Miranda Stanyon will offer reflections on the book.

About the book:
Jonas Teupert theorizes the "fugitive forms" of ephemeral German-language prose writings from the long-19th century, drawing a link between this period's literary history and political philosophy and the refugee narratives from our current moment. By engaging questions of literary form with history, philosophy, and media aesthetics, Teupert conceptualizes fugitive writing as a form that enacts the precarious flight toward freedom. The long 19th century, in addition to being relatively understudied within migration studies, represents an interstitial period in the history of modern politics. While this era often has been overlooked in discussion of the formation of subject and state, Teupert argues that the concept of fugitivity as a path towards freedom offers new insights into the resistant potential of literature produced before human movement fell under the control of state power. Reading canonical and lesser-known works by Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, and Robert Walser, this book provides a history of writing under conditions of displacement and develops fugitivity as a new category for German Studies. Furthermore, Fugitive Forms makes a case that the Germanophone canon offers literary strategies to critique and imagine community in an age of modern biopolitics.

Speaker bios:
Jonas Teupert teaches German literature, language, and culture at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on questions of displacement, bringing nineteenth-century German authors into constellation with migratory writing in a digital age.

Miranda Stanyon is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne, where her research centres on English and German literary cultures in the long eighteenth century. Her most recent book is the edited collection Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity (CUP, 2025, with Emily Pillinger).

Andrew Benjamin is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in English at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Art of Gesture: Classical and Renaissance Expressions (Edinburgh, 2026).

All are welcome. No booking necessary.