Romantic Fairy Tales
Editor - Carol Tully
Penguin Classics
Paperback
: 17 Apr 2000
£12.99
Synopsis
Deeply affected by the turmoil of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, many of the great German Romantics adopted the Kunstmärchen or 'literary fairytale' to express their fascination with mystery, mediaevalism and the darker side of human nature. Though himself a committed Classicist, Goethe helped establish the genre in his richly imaginative Fairytale (1795). Ludwig Tieck's Eckbert the Fair (1797) depicts a pair of outsiders who have sought refuge from the world in the solitude of dark woods and in scandalous incestuous passion, while Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine (1811) is a water nymph who falls in love, acquires a soul and so discovers the reality of human suffering. In Clemens Brentano's Tale of Honest Casper and Fair Annie (1817), a young couple is engulfed by tragedy due to a false sense of honour and pride which has been passed down to them through the generations. Shot through with alien atmospheres and supernatural menace, these works retain their power to intrigue and disturb; they also vividly illustrate the development of German sensibility through the course of the whole Romantic period.
