Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
1 - Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
It is with an equal portion of surprise and alarm that we witness in this country, a glaring depravity of taste, as displayed in the extreme eagerness for foreign productions, and a systematic design to extend the depravity by regular importation of exotic poison from the envenomed crucibles of the literary and political alchymists of the new German school.
— John Boening, ed., The Reception of Classical German Literature in England, 1760–1860As a literature fixated on uncanny disruptions to a seemingly stable order, it is more than ironic that the German Schauerroman has itself been widely ignored, perhaps even suppressed, by literary historians over the years. From the outset German literature occupied something of a privileged, albeit vilified position within the transnational framework of the gothic on the emerging literary market around 1800. For earliest critics in Britain such as Jane Austen or the Anti-Jacobin, gothic fiction was synonymous with an image of Germany as the depraved site of necromancy, secret societies, and wanton violence. When Austen completed Northanger Abbey in 1798, her parody of gothic novels contained not only Karl Friedrich Kahlert's The Necromancer and Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (original titles: Der Geisterbanner and Der Genius), her list of “horrid novels” extended to English works obviously hoping to profit from the German influx: Francis Lathom's supposed “German Story Founded on Incidents of Real Life” The Midnight Bell and Eliza Parsons's “German Story” Castle of Wolfenbach and her “German Tale” The Mysterious Warning.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Popular RevenantsThe German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000, pp. 10 - 43Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012