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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Tales From the 'Phantasus,' etc. of Ludwig Tieck," the reader is invited into a captivating world of romantic imagination and profound psychological exploration. Tieck's narrative style merges lyrical prose with dreamlike scenarios, reflecting the burgeoning Romantic movement of the early 19th century. The stories present intricate character studies intertwined with folklore and philosophical musings, often delving into themes of identity, the supernatural, and the nature of art itself. This collection showcases Tieck's innovative narrative techniques and his depth of thought, drawing connections between the emotional lives of his characters and the broader existential questions of the human experience. Ludwig Tieck, a central figure in the German Romantic movement, was deeply influenced by his experiences and the artistic currents of his time. His engagement with literature, art, and philosophy shaped his works, allowing him to draw from a rich tapestry of cultural influences. Tieck's close relationships with contemporaries such as Goethe and the Schlegel brothers further honed his literary voice, positioning him as both a creator and a critic of Romantic ideals. His exploration of the fantastical reflects a yearning for transcendence and a deep contemplation of human existence. This collection is essential for anyone interested in the interplay of imagination and reality in literature. Readers will find Tieck's tales not only enchanting but also intellectually stimulating, as they confront timeless questions through a uniquely personal lens. Dive into this treasure trove of stories that resonate with the complexities of the human soul, and experience the vivid landscapes of Tieck's mind. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Tales From the "Phantasus," etc. of Ludwig Tieck
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection, Tales From the "Phantasus," etc. of Ludwig Tieck, gathers a focused selection of his Romantic prose to present readers with a coherent portal into his imaginative world. Curated from the cycles associated with Phantasus and cognate writings, it aims to balance breadth and unity: a progression from a prefatory orientation into tales that explore enchantment, friendship, temptation, and fate. Rather than a complete works or a scholarly apparatus, the volume serves as an accessible showcase of Tieck’s narrative art, inviting new readers and returning admirers alike to encounter the textures, moods, and philosophical tensions that helped define German Romantic literature.
The contents are chiefly prose narratives: short tales and novellas, including literary fairy tales and reimaginings of medieval and folkloric legends. A prefatory section introduces the tenor of the collection and signals Tieck’s concern with art, imagination, and storytelling. The pieces range from intimate portraits of friendship and estrangement to excursions into the supernatural, where uncanny visitations and otherworldly beckonings test the boundaries of sense. Although diverse in setting and tone, they share a compactness of form and a concentration on pivotal encounters, ensuring that each narrative stands independently while contributing to the volume’s cumulative resonance.
As a whole, these works pursue the Romantic tension between inward yearning and external reality. Liminal spaces—at forest edges, mountain passes, thresholds, and twilight hours—become stages where the ordinary slips into the marvelous. Figures driven by curiosity or devotion confront alluring mysteries: the promise of ecstatic art, the pull of hidden riches, the whisper of ancestral legend. The moral contours are rarely simple; comforts of custom may mask deeper disquiet, while the uncanny can expose forgotten truths. In this interplay, Tieck cultivates a reflective wonder, inviting readers to weigh desire against duty and to sense how imagination shapes destiny.
Stylistically, Tieck’s hallmarks are evident throughout: lucid yet musical prose; swift transitions from everyday speech to heightened vision; and a supple narrative voice that both inhabits and observes the tale. He favors frames and conversational openings that place storytelling itself under scrutiny, then allows the plot to glide toward moments of arresting stillness or sudden revelation. Descriptive passages are economical but evocative, often anchoring moods in concrete images of woodlands, halls, and solitary roads. Irony works quietly beside sympathy, and the supernatural, when it appears, is rendered with the same measured clarity as the domestic scene.
The collection’s unity also arises from its dialogue with tradition. Tieck engages the inherited store of legend and folktale not as a collector of curiosities but as an artist concerned with how such materials speak to modern sensibility. Medieval motifs, chivalric names, and folk beliefs are filtered through contemporary reflection, so that enchantment becomes a medium for ethical and psychological inquiry. This approach—neither naïve repetition nor skeptical dismissal—characterizes the Romantic literary fairy tale and is central to Tieck’s practice. The result is a body of narratives that are at once archetypal and idiosyncratically personal.
Equally notable is the collection’s sustained meditation on art. Prefatory reflections and several tales foreground questions about the nature of creativity, the responsibilities of the artist, and the risks of aesthetic rapture. Music, poetry, and storytelling are treated as powers that can elevate, estrange, or endanger, depending on how they are pursued and understood. Without pronouncing doctrine, the volume stages conversations—implicit and explicit—about judgment, tradition, and inspiration. In doing so, it offers a prism through which to view Tieck’s broader contribution to Romantic poetics: an insistence that the imaginative act is inseparable from ethical and existential choice.
These pieces remain significant because they model a way of reading the world that is alert to mystery without abandoning reason. Their restraint resists sensationalism; their wonder resists cynicism. For contemporary audiences, the tales offer more than historical interest: they distill problems of belonging, loyalty, and self-knowledge into compact forms whose ambiguity rewards revisiting. Approached individually or as an unfolding sequence, they reveal a consistent artistic conscience and a generous curiosity about human motives. This collection thus provides both a reliable introduction to Tieck’s narrative art and a lasting companion for readers drawn to the enduring questions of Romanticism.
Historical Context
Born in Berlin on 31 May 1773, Ludwig Tieck became a leading voice of early German Romanticism. After studies at Halle and Göttingen in the early 1790s, he forged a program for art fairy tales, medieval revivals, and reflective narrative. Many tales later gathered under the rubric Phantasus had earlier origins, yet the three volumes issued between 1812 and 1816 provided a retrospective frame for works such as The Elves, The Runenberg, and The White Egbert. Tieck died in Berlin on 28 April 1853, his career spanning the era from Enlightenment debate to post-Napoleonic restoration, a period that shaped the concerns visible across this collection.
Historic Jena Romanticism supplied the milieu for Tieck's formative years. Around 1799 to 1801, he associated with August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and philosophers like Fichte and Schelling, uniting aesthetics, irony, and Catholic-tinged medieval piety. With his friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, he advanced the cult of art and inwardness inaugurated by Wackenroder's 1796 Herzensergiessungen, extended by Tieck in Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798). The conversational, reflective tone pervading Phantasus echoes the circle's salon and journal culture, where friendship, reconciliation, and brotherhood furnished ethical and narrative problems mirrored by pieces here titled The Friends, The Reconciliation, and The Brothers.
Romantic medievalism and the collection of national traditions formed a second foundation. Tieck edited medieval lyric in Minnelieder aus dem schwabischen Zeitalter in 1803 and promoted old Volksbücher, while Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano issued Des Knaben Wunderhorn between 1805 and 1808, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812 and 1815. Legends of Tannhäuser and the faithful Eckart, tied to the Wartburg and the Venusberg near Eisenach in Thuringia, thus reentered literary life as emblematic narratives. Their integration with art fairy tales situates this collection within a broader patriotic recovery of premodern German lore.
Landscape and the mining regions of central Europe provided both setting and metaphysical charge. The Harz mountains, the Ore Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, and Bohemia offered forests, pits, and caverns where the uncanny meets everyday labor. Novalis, a mining engineer trained at the Freiberg Academy under Abraham Gottlob Werner in 1797 to 1800, exemplified the era's mineral metaphors and speculative natural philosophy, which Tieck absorbed. The Runenberg and The White Egbert, alongside The Elves, draw on this environment of superstition, geology, and wandering, in which fortune, crystals, and forest solitude allegorize unstable identities and the era's search for a living nature.
The political upheavals of the Napoleonic period sharpened this retreat into inwardness. Prussia's defeat at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806 and the French occupation of Berlin imposed censorship and dislocation, while the Wars of Liberation culminating in Leipzig in 1813 catalyzed cultural nationalism. Against bureaucratic rationalization and early industrial change, Tieck staged craft traditions, domestic rituals, and intimate vows. Works with magical vessels, tokens, and charms, such as The Mysterious Cup and The Love-Charm, resonate with a Biedermeier ethos taking shape after 1815: an ethical refuge in home and art that nonetheless keeps the supernatural disturbingly near.
Tieck's dramaturgical practice anchored his prose in theatrical sensibility. In concert with August Wilhelm Schlegel from 1797 to 1810, and later Dorothea Tieck and Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin between 1825 and 1833, he advanced the standard German Shakespeare, cultivating flexible blank verse and romantic stagecraft. As adviser at the Dresden Court Theatre from the mid 1820s and reader to Frederick William IV in Berlin from 1841, he shaped repertory and taste. This theatrical environment, alongside the musical revival of legend exemplified by Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz in 1821 and Wagner's Tannhäuser in 1845, informs the collection's performative energies.
Print culture and salons framed the circulation of these tales. The Athenaeum journal of 1798 to 1800, the Weimar nexus of Goethe and Schiller, and Berlin's salons under Rahel Levin Varnhagen fostered conversation and reading aloud. Phantasus embeds dialogues and framing narratives that imitate such social exchange, while the pocketbooks and almanacs of the 1810s and 1820s created venues for short fiction consumed by the Bildungsbürgertum. Publishers in Berlin and Tübingen broadened the audience, and the tale form's blend of parable, confession, and anecdote allowed Tieck to mediate between Enlightenment rationality and the romantic hunger for mystery across the collection.
Translation and reception secured Tieck's afterlife beyond Germany. In 1827 Thomas Carlyle's German Romance introduced English readers to Tieck through versions of The Fair-Haired Eckbert and The Trusty Eckart, while mid nineteenth century translators such as John Oxenford extended the corpus under titles like Tales from the Phantasus. These renderings fed Victorian images of German inwardness and the uncanny. Within Germany, Tieck's later Berlin years to 1853 saw him curate and revise his oeuvre, influencing and conversing with contemporaries such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and later heirs of the Kunstmärchen. The collection thus records a career continually reframed.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE.
Introduces Tieck’s romantic aims and the blend of fairy-tale, legend, and psychological tale found in the collection, situating the pieces within his broader Phantasus project. It frames the stories as experiments in imagination, irony, and the marvelous.
THE RECONCILIATION.
A domestic narrative in which estrangement born of pride and miscommunication brings a household to the brink, until an unforeseen crisis compels candor and forgiveness.
THE FRIENDS.
Two inseparable companions find their bond tested by love, ambition, and misread intentions, as shifting loyalties reveal how friendship can mirror rivalry.
THE ELVES.
An encounter with the elfin world brings secret gifts and prohibitions into an ordinary life; when human curiosity oversteps its bounds, fortune and enchantment change course.
THE WHITE EGBERT.
After a noble couple confide a strange childhood tale of a forest crone and a fabulous bird, doubt and uncanny recognitions unsettle their marriage and sense of reality.
THE FAITHFUL ECKART.
A legendary guardian stands before a perilous mountain realm, warning mortals against seductive voices; his steadfastness becomes a parable of loyalty and renunciation.
THE TANNENHÄUSER.
A minstrel-knight entangled in the pleasures of Venusberg undertakes a pilgrimage for absolution, wavering between sensual enchantment and spiritual release.
THE RUNENBERG.
A young hunter, haunted by a rune-inscribed stone and visions of a mountain maiden, abandons settled life for a consuming pursuit of otherworldly riches and meaning.
THE MYSTERIOUS CUP.
An uncanny chalice circulates among lovers and rivals, its origins obscured; in seeking to possess it, characters expose hidden desires and are forced to choose between honor and desire.
THE LOVE-CHARM.
A hapless suitor turns to magic to secure affection, triggering comic entanglements and moral reckonings that puncture superstition and vanity.
THE BROTHERS.
Two brothers of opposing temperaments are separated by fate and misunderstanding, until chance encounters and long-buried ties confront them with questions of identity and duty.
