Populäre Erscheinungen: Der deutsche Schauerroman um 1800 ed. by Barry Murnane, Andrew Cusack (review)

The subject matter of this book—the German Schauerroman, or “horror novel,” is a welcome treatment of a little-understood yet fascinating aspect of German romantic literature around the year 1800. As with many collections of this type, readers will find some essays more insightful and more aligned to a particular interest than others. On the whole the essays are engaging not only for their discussion of the German Schauerroman but also for connections made to well-known authors of the period, such as Friedrich Schiller, Jean Paul, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The seventeen essays are arranged into three sections: the Schauerroman as a bridge between the Enlightenment and the modern, manifestations of horror novels, and the Schauerroman and romanticism. While perhaps a convenient grouping for the essays, the three sections may mislead in their implication of cohesion and progressive insight.

This book is an outgrowth of a 2009 conference organized by the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and Trinity College Dublin. Most of the contributors are from universities throughout Germany, with a few from Dublin, the United Kingdom, and Cyprus. All essays are in German. The introduction lays out the key issues with Schauerroman scholarship, proposes that “Schauer” (horror) rather than “gothic” serve as the genre designation, and suggests Schauerroman as a possible umbrella term for Ritter-, Räuber-, and Schauerromane (knight novels, robber novels, and horror novels).

The four essays in the first section take as their general theme the Schauerroman as a transitional genre between Enlightenment and modernity. Ernst Stöckmann offers some potentially useful anthropological background on terror in general, and Mario Grizelj thoughtfully presents the problem of scholarship in the area of German Unterhaltungsliteratur (light fiction) and highlights the importance of this mode of literature.

The third section of the book, “Schauerroman und Romantik,” contains seven essays, some focused on specific authors and others more general. The author-specific essays are well-written and informative, but interesting more as new perspectives on Hoffmann, Schubert, or Jean Paul rather than on the Schauerroman as a genre. In a more general essay, Hans Brittnacher discusses European and American gothic works that represent the fascination and exoticism of the North and South poles. With its rather surprising and intriguing topic, the essay yields the good insight, among others, that the name “gothic novel” and its accompanying medieval motifs obscure much of the modernity at the core of some of these works. Almut Nickel’s essay offers an interesting, if somewhat superficial, glimpse into the subgenre of Nachtstücke (night pieces), outlining what they are, their origin, and their main motifs. One comes away with a good introduction to their common motifs, but not a clear sense of connections to romanticism or to the general topic of the Schauerroman.

The six essays that comprise the middle section of the book were, for me, by far the most engaging, focused as they were on the core topic of the German Schauerroman. Although there is some repetitiveness, reading all six provides new insight into the German horror novel. One repeated topic is the description of the Schauerroman as a genre distinguished by a set number of plots and motifs—clichés—which can be simply recast or moved around in order to create multiple novels. Half of the essays in this section focus on a single author. Two are successful, in my opinion, in appealing to a nonspecialist and in increasing understanding of the German horror novel. Christian Heinrich Spiess, a prolific writer of the genre, is featured in one essay, but most readers would probably need more background (and interest) to really appreciate the detailed analysis that is provided. Silke Arnold-de Simine’s engaging essay on Benedikte Naubert offers insights into her British reception and other connections between German and English gothic literature. The essay places the Schauerroman in its historical context and provides understanding of the genre itself, with...