Preissler’s Plates for Zachariae’s Die Tageszeiten (1756): Strategies of Iconotextual Meaning-Making and Visual Criticism

This article examines the set of four full-page illustrations and a title-page vignette that the Rostock publisher Johann Christian Koppe commissioned Johann Justin Preißler to produce for his edition of Justus Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae’s Die Tageszeiten (1756). It offers an account of the ways in which the plates fulfil a literary-critical function of making textual knowledge present by reordering textual meaning through a selective reconstitution of the poem’s discursive systems. Creating narrative illustrations that in the scenes they construct create new connections between otherwise distinct textual passages, the full-page plates reinvent Zachariae’s poem by not following the poem’s progressive structure. Instead, they foreground the episodic through the combination of different modes of representation, ranging from realist and sentimental to allegorical, at the same time redacting the sensational.