Narraciones románticas alemanas

The German Romantic movement is far from being a movement with unique and homogeneous characteristics. Among the authors that make it up, important differences in style, aesthetic program or moralizing purposes are recognized. This will be confirmed by the reader of this anthological volume, attentive to the narrative of that period. You will see how Ludwig Tieck ("The blond Eckbert"), enormously brilliant, enters fully into the topics of melancholy, the abysmal, the dark and the fantastic; how Novalis ("The disciples in Sais") is the narrator with the greatest philosophical substance and the most ambitious amalgamation of nature and humanity; how Kleist ("Michael Kohlhaas", "The Betrothal of Santo Domingo"), the most "committed" of this cast of narrators, anticipates Kafka in presenting the struggle between the rational and individual sense of justice and the laws taxes of common justice, or its arbitrariness; and how Chamisso ("The Wonderful Story of Peter Schlemihl") doses the use of fantasy that Hoffmann ("Kreislerian") used massively, interested in turn in music, its methods and its effects on feelings. The six pieces gathered here, on the border between the story and the short novel, thus make up a panoply of imaginative resources that explore the different directions in which German romanticism expanded. All of them constitute masterpieces of their genre, and together they seem to agree with Friedrich Schlegel when he wrote in 1798: "The romantic literary genre is the only one that is more than a genre, and the only one that is in a certain way the art of the literary: because, in a certain sense, all literature is or should be romantic ".