The translator and the fairies: Christoph Martin Wieland’s Oberon and the British Romantics

Abstract

One of the outstanding German authors between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christoph Martin Wieland was the author of fundamental and celebrated works like Agathon (1767–73) and Oberon (1780). He also wrote a large number of literary fairy‐tales (Kunstmärchen) and translated the works of William Shakespeare into German. The whole of his career as a novelist, poet, and playwright shows evidence of his interest in the English literary tradition and of his efforts to act as a mediator between the German and the British cultural context. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the influence that the works of a German author so deeply influenced by English literature reciprocally had on some British writers, by focusing on two important aspects of the Romantic re‐shaping and re‐definition of the distinctive character of German and English national identities: Shakespeare’s work and the “fairy way of writing.” The paper will show how Wieland’s treatment of these elements, defying the “nationalization” of the imaginary, transforms them in the currency of a truly transnational cultural exchange that moves across national boundaries, and undermines the very categories on which the Romantic attempt to shape national identity is based.