Eight German Novellas

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 18th 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 Storm's use of the language of 19th-century psychiatry in "The White Horse Rider", the insane subject of Buchner's "Lenz" and grotesque horror of Stifter's "Tourmaline" - to the the moral ambiguity and uncertain framework of knowledge in "The Jew's Beech", Von Kleist's paradoxical "The Marchioness of O..." and the satirical social expose of Keller's "Clothes Make the Man".
All eight tales have been newly translated for this edition, and the introduction explores and analyzes the narrative devices of the individual stories. These "Novellen" by leading German writers of the 19th century are classics of their genre. This book is intended for undergraduate courses in German literature, or 19th-century European literature.