In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Literature of German Romanticism
  • Karen Campbell
The Literature of German Romanticism. Edited by Dennis F. Mahoney. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004. 419 pages. $90.00.

Taken together, the fifteen diverse essays compiled and critically introduced here by Dennis F. Mahoney present an overwhelmingly successful English-language guide to the study of German Romantic literature. As explained by Mahoney, the volume is basically tripartite. His introduction and the first three pieces (by Schulz, Bohm, and Littlejohns: see below) set up a general framework for the essays to follow. The second part (with essays by Hoffmeister, Scheck, Stockinger, and Malinowksi) [End Page 573] explores traditional generic categories of lyric, epic, and drama while acknowledging the Romantic penchant for mixing of forms. The last seven essays (by Peter, Rommel, Helfer, Muxfeldt, Allert, Bishop and Stephenson, and Saul) extend the discussion in interdisciplinary directions and offer insight into the recent reception of Romanticism. The central position of the eighth essay, Fabian Lampart's "The Turn to History and the Volk: Brentano, Arnim, and the Grimm Brothers," is motivated by Mahoney with analogy to the structure of Schlegel's Lucinde (!): it "deals with topics around which the entire volume revolves [. . .] the radical restructuring of European society in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period and the efforts of [Romantics] to come to terms with this" in their writing (5). In the rest of his introduction, Mahoney offers a big-picture overview of the period, augmented by a discussion of Kleist, a hard-to-classify but decisive figure in the German response to Napoleon.

In "From 'Romantick' to 'Romantic': The Genesis of German Romanticism in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe," Gerhard Schulz presents a thorough review of the lexical application of the term from its non-German origins to its late use in Eichendorff's literary history (1857). This is especially useful given the word's internationally inconsistent application. In the second piece, "Goethe and the Romantics," Arnd Bohm gets at his subject via the English reception of German literature, concentrating on Byron and Shelley as well as Goethe, and on questions of cross-influence. English readers tend to consider Goethe a Romantic (because of Werther), and Bohm disentangles some confusions of reception and literary historiography with a predominately comparative focus. In "Early Romanticism," Richard Littlejohns maintains that the early Romantics' supposed rejection of the Enlightenment is a misunderstanding: they rejected not reason per se but "pseudo-rationalism" (62) even as they also looked to "irrational" eighteenth-century movements like Pietism and "Empfindsamkeit" for inspiration. He capably addresses other topics as well, including the French Revolution and revolutionary (re)structuring of the novel, while discussing the first wave of the Romantic movement.

"From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to anti-Meister Novels: The Romantic Novel between Tieck's William Lovell and Hoffmann's Kater Murr"—Gerhart Hoffmeister's title announces the structure of his essay, the fourth in the volume. Arguing that "the novel became the primary battleground for the Romantic revolution in literature that took shape after the publication of Goethe's [. . .] Lehrjahre" (79), he outlines the Romantic response under the rubrics "Anti-Meister Novels" (Heinrich von Ofterdingen and others) and "Diversification of the Romantic Novel" (Nachtwachen and others). While his central thesis is plausible, however, his discussion is sometimes so schematic that a reader not already familiar with the action of the novels will be hard pressed to follow some references. Ulrich Scheck's "Tales of Wonder and Terror: Short Prose of the German Romantics" follows up on the second main narrative legacy of Romanticism. From Tieck through Arnim and even Kleist, Scheck provides a handy survey of structures and themes, and ends by suggesting some preliminary connections between these writers and modern writers and filmmakers.

An admirable feature of Claudia Stockinger's "The Romantic Drama: Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Fouqué and Eichendorff" is its candor in describing a tradition not viewed as successful either in its own day or after: many of these plays were never performed. Still, Stockinger does a good job of cataloguing them, and of drawing out their differences from the Classical tradition. The scope of Bernadette Malinowski's [End Page 574] essay is also clear...

pdf