The boundaries between truth and deception are nowhere more actively at issue than in the novella genre - in Goethe's famous formulation, the exponent of 'an unheard-of event which has occurred'. The tales collected here confuse the parameters of the real and the fantastic through their depiction of the pathological, the paranormal, the eccentric, and the criminal. Influenced by Boccaccio and Cervantes, the Novelle had established itself alongside lyric poetry and drama by the end of the eighteenth century as a key literary genre in the German tradition. This selection can be read as a digest of narrative styles and themes throughout the period from Romanticism to Naturalism: from the life-threatening paradoxes of Kleist's The Marchioness of O... and the extraordinary case-history of insanity in Buchner's Lenz to the satirical social expose of Keller's Clothes Make the Man and the epic embattlement of the individual pitted against society, nature, and the supernatural in Storm's The White Horse Rider. All eight stories have been newly translated for this edition, and the Introduction explores and analyses the narrative devices of the individual tales. Often startlingly modern in their themes and their forms, these Novellen by leading German writers of the nineteenth century are classics of their genre.
The boundaries between truth and deception are nowhere more actively at issue than in the novella genre - in Goethe's famous formulation, the exponent of 'an unheard-of event which has occurred'. The tales collected here confuse the parameters of the real and the fantastic through their depiction of the pathological, the paranormal, the eccentric, and the criminal. Influenced by Boccaccio and Cervantes, the Novelle had established itself alongside lyric poetry and drama by the end of the eighteenth century as a key literary genre in the German tradition. This selection can be read as a digest of narrative styles and themes throughout the period from Romanticism to Naturalism: from the life-threatening paradoxes of Kleist's The Marchioness of O... and the extraordinary case-history of insanity in Buchner's Lenz to the satirical social expose of Keller's Clothes Make the Man and the epic embattlement of the individual pitted against society, nature, and the supernatural in Storm's The White Horse Rider. All eight stories have been newly translated for this edition, and the Introduction explores and analyses the narrative devices of the individual tales. Often startlingly modern in their themes and their forms, these Novellen by leading German writers of the nineteenth century are classics of their genre.