The story of German gothic literature is that of the meteoric rise of a popular literary style that critics nonetheless considered an unwelcome intruder, often dismissing it as the pulpy mimicry of British forerunners and as a “plague ship of German letters'' (Charles Maturin), from its beginnings with the German art ballad or Kunst ballade of Herder, Goethe, Bürger, and Hölty in the 1770s and 1780s to the gothic prose works of Schiller, Goethe and Kleist, et al. In particular, the German novella was the object of some suspicion, and, as Schiller complained of his gothic bestseller Der Geisterseher in 1788, the prose author was considered the unloved, “half-brother of the poet.” Kleist was ashamed to be associated with the disreputable genre, deriding the tendency of late-eighteenth-century literature toward stories about “knights with ghosts.” Focusing on its gothic character, no less an authority than Coleridge dismissed German Sturm und Drang and Romantic literature as merely derivative of the gloomy works of Young, Hervey, Richardson and Walpole. In her novel Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen characterizes the 1790s as a decade of “horrid” novels so stereotypically gothic and German that its most popular works constitute self-parodies on both counts. Despite the English roots of gothic literature touched on above and its increased prominence in England from 1790–1820, by the 1820s, gothic tales were so clearly established as “German Stories''—thus the title of a three-volume British collection of 1826—that Poe felt the need to reclaim the genre for all humanity in 1839: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul […].” The rest is literary history: gothic literature, and in particular German gothic short prose literature, has proven to be among the most resonant hypotexts, adapted and re-adapted in Anglo-American and European literature and film to the present day. This volume seeks to reevaluate German gothic literature after the wave of publications on the subject that renewed scholarly interest in these texts in the first decades of the twenty-first century.This study will examine the phenomenon of Gothic literature in England and Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
While the English Gothic novel has received a good deal of scholarly attention, its German counterpart, the Schauerroman, has for the most part been neglected and its ties to the English Gothic novel ignored. What scholarship there is often either dismisses the Schauerroman as a whole, trivializes its contribution to literary history, or focuses more on dividing the German Gothic tales into arbitrarily conceived subgenres. This study aims to bring the focus back on the Gothic genre as a whole in the two lands. It will examine the explosive emergence of the Gothic genre in both countries, along with its popularity and the vital role it played in the development of the novel, and of book publishing, authorship, and readership in general. It will also explore the connections and crosscurrents between Gothic tales of both lands, which includes discussing some non-Gothic works that influenced and were influenced by the genre. The focus of the study is on three main questions: first of all, whether there was a German counterpart to the English Gothic novel; secondly, whether all Schauerroman belong in the category of Trivialliteratur, and finally, whether any crosscurrents between the Gothic literatures of England and Germany exist.
