The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and German Romanticism by Frederick Burwick (review)

238Rocky Mountain Review outside the social fabric" (142). Thus "work and money, censure and punishment join in the figure of the Jew in all three tales which have a Jewish protagonist" (123). As Wilhelm revised through the years, the anti-Semitic tone became sharper. No Jewish child, mother, or grandmother appears in these stories (142), but only the Jewish male who goes down to perdition, preferably by way ofthe gallows. Since the entire study encompasses an interpretation of the many tales, only a close examination of the whole will inform the reader of the true value of Bottigheimer's work. This review merely hints at its scope. Certainly Bottigheimer knows her Grimms. Specialists will no doubt disagree with the author's insistence on the high place accorded the two German brothers, preferring, among others, the tales of the Irish wee folk, Andersen's ennobling characters, or the 600 narratives collected by the Russian Afanasiev. Further, a more fluid rendering would make for more pleasurable reading. Bottigheimer's power to persuade is diminished by her rhetoric. Since her book encompasses far more than her engaging title suggests, it is a misnomer; plainly her study is better served by her subtitle: The Moral and Social Vision in Grimms' Tales. Minor quibbling aside, Bottigheimer's fresh interpretation is a needed addition to intuitive research on the Brothers Grimm. A positive factor is her inclusion of all quotations in both English and German. In sum, her book is an essential addition to the serious scholar's library. PAULA KISKA University ofTexas at El Paso FREDERICK BURWICK. The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and German Romanticism. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987. 300 p. This study examines "what excites the peculiar play of attraction and repulsion, and what internal processes of shaping the perceptions contribute to the manifold tensions in grotesque phenomena" (9). Burwick's examination of perception and the grotesque in Romantic literature is a perceptive, thorough, incisive, and at times trenchant analysis of those two key and interrelated subjects. Burwick is equally skillful in discussing the relationship of perception to the grotesque in German and in English literature . His analyses focus on such subjects as "Grotesque Bilderwitz in Friedrich Schlegel" and "Grotesque Alterity in Coleridge." The study culminates in a discussion of the grotesque in Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death Jest-Book and Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod. Although the latter were written after the age of High Romanticism, Burwick demonstrates, nonetheless, that the grotesque gains in these works "new dimensions of irony and ideological nihilism" (277). Other authors treated by Burwick within the context of perception and the grotesque are E.T.A. Hoffmann, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Keats, and Tieck. Burwick's study is a welcome addition to earlier investigations of the grotesque such as Wolfgang Kayser's Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (1957). Burwick states correctly that in Kayser's effort to seek a universal definition of the grotesque, the phenomological implications of the grotesque were ignored "if not lost completely" in favor of a Book Reviews239 "structural resolution" (9). Continuing his critique of Kayser's work on the grotesque, Burwick emphasizes that Kayser was primarily "concerned with the 'Gestalt' and less concerned with the gestaltende process of perception" (10). Of course, it is the "gestaltende process of perception" which, in part, commands Burwick's attention and interest. Burwick's approach is historical and comparative, and he is meticulous in surveying in his opening chapter , "Modes of Perception," some of the most important theories of perception ranging from Descartes through Herbart, giving special attention to the antecedents of "Gestalt Theory" in Reid and Kant. The second chapter of Burwick's investigation centers on how the grotesque, which had its origins in the visual arts, became a prominent literary term, and how the conceptual shift took place with the advent of Romantic aesthetics. Drawing on Johann Dominic Fiorillo's Über die Groteske (1791), and the latter's crucial role in defending and freeing the grotesque from the earlier dictates of aestheticians, especially those of Andreas Riem and Friedrich Wilhelm Ramdohr, Burwick convincingly shows that transition. One of Burwick's most intriguing chapters deals with Coleridge...