Hybrid edition ´Annotated Complete Works of Kofler´

Thanks to his refusal to make aesthetic compromises, his radical enlightening impetus and his linguistic, media and social criticism, since the late 1960s the writer Werner Kofler has been one of Austrias most important satirists. The production of an annotated edition of his complete works (FWF Project P 27418) will make an essential contribution to the wider understanding of his writings and to the canonisation of his work. In the process, the publication format applied for here opens a new way of conveying literature: The hybrid edition Annotated Complete Works of Kofler (KWWK) aims to prepare the complete prose works in two closely related editions as a book and as a website and to use the specific opportunities of the respective medium. The primary text published in book form will ensure a compact, affordable and easily readable complete edition of Koflers works. In addition to the primary text and commentary, the print version includes extensive explanatory postscripts. The digital utilisation of the commentary makes new and multiple possibilities for access to Werner Koflers work possible. Owing to the unlimited space, in contrast to the print version the website can contain extensive image material and thereby offer a low-threshold and attractive access to Koflers work: photos, newspaper cuttings and facsimiles from archive material from the estate will be assigned to individual commentaries in order to make the discursive background and the context in which the texts were written visible. Sources and their utilisation in literary text are linked, which facilitates conclusions on Koflers working methods. The information can be processed by the recipients using various tools and thus provides access to the Koflerish uvre for interested readers and visitors as well as for literary scholarship. Users can navigate their own paths through our service and make contact with the commentary (and thereby indirectly also with the primary text) with their specific (research) questions, and interact with the reference system, the wealth of allusion and quotation in Koflers literature. The hybrid edition makes Koflers work readable as a a commentary on public, political and cultural life since the 1970s, opens up the store of knowledge in his writings and shows his important aesthetic position for Austrian literature.