Ludwig Tieck Research Articles

Aspects of Romantic Mentality: Ludwig Tieck

Aspects of Romantic Mentality: Ludwig Tieck

Bad Plants

“Bad plants” represent the seemingly unexpected and startling forms of plant power overlooked by many modern, industrialized societies that treat vegetal beings as mere resources instead of animate, world-shaping forces. Since science fiction and fairy tales often explore more openly animistic visions of non-human life, such texts provide ample possibilities for reconsideration by critical plant studies of our human-plant relations both cultural and ecological. For example, both Jack McDevitt’s 2001 science fiction novel, Deepsix, and Ludwig Tieck’s 1799 fairy tale, “Faithful Eckart and Tannhäuser”, feature “bad plants” that bring human beings violently back into the plant cycles they assume they have left behind with advanced culture and/or technology. In McDevitt’s case, we find sexualized predatory flowers on an alien planet, and in Tieck’s, flower-filled caves containing Venus herself living deep in the forested mountain. The wildly sexual blossoms lure human beings back into their botanical cycles, thereby expressing and, simultaneously, hiding our ecological embeddedness that is actually quite mundane. The lurid visions of “bad plants” contain potentially profound, if convoluted, ecological truths about our full dependence on, and ongoing immersion within, the activities of the domineering green photosynthesizers.

Tieck’s Alternative Theory of Romantic Irony

ABSTRACT: This paper reexamines Ludwig Tieck’s theoretical contributions to Romantic irony and contrasts Tieck’s underacknowledged importance in this area with Friedrich Schlegel’s usual characterization as the progenitor of widely adopted ironic theory. With a unique understanding of dialogic self-creation, Tieck’s 1795 epistolary novel William Lovell proleptically critiques features of what will become the dominant Romantic-ironic worldviews articulated by Schlegel. More specifically, Tieck’s novel stresses the existence of a blind spot within the otherwise circumspect character of irony, foregrounding the risk of egoistic behavior that arises from Schlegel’s positive evaluation of constant subjective activity. Wary of such a risk, Tieck’s theory of irony represents a road not taken with respect to irony’s use as a tool to control and limit the self.

Ludwig Tick’s Overhaul of Charles Perrot’s Fairy Tales “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Bluebeard”

This paper studies two plays by Ludwig Tieck (“Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood” and “Knight Bluebeard”) in the context of the writer’s innovations introduced to Charles Perrault’s stories. The tragedy “Life and Death of Little Red Riding Hood” has been analyzed aiming to show the declination in the main characters and their behavior differ from those in the original and much attention is given to the way Charles Perrault’s story is transformed. When analysing “Knight Bluebeard” we mostly concentrate upon the main Villain, upon Tiek’s subtle psychologism and the play’s romantic universum. The result of the study is demonstrating Ludwig Tiek’s most important innovations characterising both plays as well as either of them.

Zeitwahrnehmung und -darstellung in Ludwig Tiecks Die Elfen und den Kindermärchen E.T.A. Hoffmanns

The present article discusses three romantic fairy tales which are closely linked by intertextual references and each of which focuses on children as main characters: Ludwig Tieck’s The Elves and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Strange Child. The article shows that these works reflect a changed concept and perception of time which emerged during the modernization process. It examines the ways in which the tales make various aspects of this “modern time regime” a subject of discussion and tries to work out how the authors position themselves regarding the problems and conflicts that result from the newly emerging concept of time. While Tieck deals with forms of acceleration embedded in economic interrelations, Hoffmann addresses issues arising from the establishment of time discipline and connects his reflections with his poetic concepts.

Ludwig Tieck’s Kaiser Octavianus as the Capstone of Early Romanticism

ABSTRACT When Ludwig Tieck started to publish his Schriften in 1828, he opened the edition with Kaiser Octavianus (1804), thereby setting the drama as the capstone to Early Romanticism. In this essay, I intend to explore what might have motivated Tieck’s decision and to what extent it can be justified. Firstly, I will argue that Kaiser Octavianus fulfils a requirement for good poetry formulated in the early essay ‘Über Shakspeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren’ (1793) that the poet should take subjects from folklore and sublimate them, thus creating a combination of simplicity and artificiality. Secondly, the drama can also be considered a contribution to the creation of a new mythology as proposed by Tieck’s associate Friedrich Schlegel. Thirdly, Kaiser Octavianus constitutes an example of Schlegel’s ‘Universalpoesie’, mixing genres and styles in a drama of epic proportions.

The late Goethe: New directions

The late Goethe: New directions

The Aesthetics of Impotentiation in Tieck and Hölderlin

This article argues that the works of Ludwig Tieck—specifically the fairy tales collected in Phantasus—and the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin operate according to an aesthetics of impotentiation. Impotentiation designates the coexistence of seemingly opposed operations: on the one hand, the generation of forms that can be developed further in unexpected directions; and on the other hand, impotence, a condition whereby processes of emergence are brought to a standstill. The works of Tieck and Hölderlin draw on these operations to imbue sites of deviant emergence with uncertainty, albeit directed toward different ends. Tieck dramatizes the shifting of states in which everyday forms of intelligibility are briefly suspended, thereby allowing individuals to explore alternative forms of being, some of which are transgressive, some of which are redemptive, if but for a short while; his tales gesture at impotent forms not capable of development, but nevertheless invested with a critical force over and against problematic reality. Hölderlin situates his poetic voice on the cusp of an emergent order that would entail a revolutionary suspension of cultural norms; poised between the possibility of renewal and the danger of annihilation, his poetry invests such inflection points with an increased sense of urgency.

«ВТОРИННІ ДЖЕРЕЛА» КЕЛЬТСЬКОГО ТА ГЕРМАНО-СКАНДИНАВСЬКОГО МОДУСІВ В СУЧАСНІЙ ПОПУЛЯРНІЙ КУЛЬТУРІ ЧЕРЕЗ ПРИЗМУ ЖАНРУ ФЕНТЕЗІ

The article deals with the main sources of the modern fantasy genre, presented in the form of several blocks of borrowings. First of all, this is the influence of the figures of the «Celtic Revival», who were engaged the search, recording and systematization of mainly Irish, Scottish and Welsh tales, myths and a wide range of folklore material. This legacy was transformed into an original literary tradition characterized by a combination of legendary heritage with fictional art elements and authorial reworking. Examples of pseudo-translations from Celtic languages presented as authentic, such as the work of James Macpherson. The article identifies the key figures of the «Celtic Revival» and singles out their works, which, in the opinion of the author, had the greatest impact on the formation of the fantasy genre. In particular William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Persse (usually Lady Gregory), Thomas Moore, Edward John Moreton Plunkett (usually Lord Dunsany), Irish writer, poet, painter – George Russell, Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore – John Millington Synge, Irish writer Alice Letitia Milligan. The Romantic Age in English literature had a significant impact on the fantasy genre. The author analyzed the most relevant creative developments in this connection: William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley. Gothic fiction and in particular Gothic novels, is an equally important «factor of influence». First of all, it is about Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker. The author presents a vision of the «wide treasury of inspiration» opus of the main archetypes of European fantasy, which also includes «German Romanticism». It is represented Ludwig von Arnim, Ernst Hoffmann, Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich von Hardenberg (usually Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff.

Queering Material Nature: Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment

Queering Material Nature:Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment Melissa Sheedy "The notions of less abstract natures, as man, dog, dove, … do not deceive us materially, yet even these are sometimes confused by the mutability of matter and the intermixture of things."1 "The old woman would at one moment be stroking the little dog, at the next talking to the bird … As I regarded her, I began to shudder, for her face twitched the whole time and she kept shaking, … so that I could not tell what she really looked like."2 From Goethe's grimoires to Lessing's lessons, the literatures and philosophies of the eighteenth century mark many turning points in the discursive and material relationships between humankind and nonhuman nature. A renegotiation of the boundaries between observation and intuition, these discourses articulate a gendered natural world that is at once static, vulnerable, and ripe for the intellectual plucking, while also dynamic, incomprehensible, and unexpected. From the "Man of Reason's" dominion over the landscape3 to Kant's claim that, for the entirety of the "fair sex," the step into Enlightened maturity is both too onerous and too dangerous,4 the bifurcation of a feminized nature at odds with a rational masculine civilization is predicated on long-standing culturally codified norms. Despite these pervasive binaries, the literature of this period is alive with queerly material oddities and marvelous bodies, embodied within the transgressive figure of the witch or witch-like woman. To engage with these mercurial materialities, I propose a queer ecocritical framework that explores depictions of the natural world as a subversive, agential force that resists perception and control. One example of this resistance can be found in Ludwig Tieck's Der Blonde Eckbert ("Eckbert the Fair"), which, I argue, queers Enlightenment epistemes by exploring taboo relationships and desires, unruly nature, and unexpected, transgressive bodies. Reading Tieck's 1797 novella through a queer ecocritical lens sheds light on our understanding of the human and more than human and reveals new potential for transgressing and transcending heteropatriarchal norms. Given the gendered and, at times, contradictory conceptions of nature and the natural world within Enlightenment discourses, feminist material ecocriticism provides a fruitful lens through which to consider binary structures such as culture/nature, reason/emotion, conqueror/conquered, and [End Page 155] heteronormative/queer, all of which relate by analogy to the overarching male/female dichotomy.5 Within this framework, the recent "material turn"6 in ecocritical and environmental scholarship comprises an interdisciplinary set of approaches toward matter and material nature that foregrounds nonhuman agency and decenters the human subject.7 It seeks to deconstruct the conventional gendered nature/culture dichotomy that conceptualizes the natural world as an entity oppressed, exploited, and feminized, thus posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal view of the conquests of (male) human reason.8 This perspective acknowledges nature as an omnipresent force with fluid boundaries and recognizes the political voice of the more-than-human realm. Through this conception of nature as a network of interactive matter in possession of intentionality and agency, material feminism repositions and redefines the key players in the traditionally reinforced nature-culture hierarchy. In their deconstruction of heteropatriarchal hegemonies, critical discourses in material feminism and queer theories can be brought into conversation with one another. Coined in 1991 by Teresa de Lauretis,9 queer theory encompasses a paradigm of approaches with the goal of acknowledging and making space for a variety of positionalities with respect not only to sexuality, but also race, gender, and age. In the sense of transgressing and transcending heteronormative structures and histories,10 "queering" has vital implications for environmentalism and ecocritical studies. On the one hand, queer theory challenges the idea of a sexually normative nature rooted in biologically sanctioned reproduction,11 but it also comprises a discursive troubling of these pervasive dichotomies. Like feminist ecocritical approaches, it offers a means to deconstruct the gendered depictions of the more-than-human realm and acknowledge a natural world with a range of enacted identities and bodies that do not fit into the patriarchal world order. As Sue-Ellen Case suggests, queer theory "works not at the site of gender...

Verse Arabesque

Verse Arabesque Ewan Jones (bio) In the long list of things that John Ruskin did not like, Raphael's Vatican loggias come near the top: "Raphael's arabesque," he writes in the third volume of The Stones of Venice, "is mere elaborate idleness. It has neither meaning nor heart in it; it is an unnatural and monstrous abortion."1 In condemning these frescoes, which decorated the corridor space of the Apostolic Palace (see Fig. 1), Ruskin ran (as often) counter to the spirit of the time. He elsewhere cheerfully conceded as much: "I know what authority there is against me. I remember the scrolls of Perugino's angels, and the ribands of Raphael's arabesques and of Ghiberti's glorious bronze flowers: no matter; they are every one of them vices and uglinesses" (W, 8: 149). Even J. M. W. Turner, Ruskin's exemplary modern artist, disagreed, having conducted a detailed study of the loggia during his first Italian tour of 1819–1820. Ruskin's repeated choice of the word "arabesque" is worthy of note, given that art criticism more typically considers the loggia under a related but distinct heading. Raphael produced his frescoes shortly after the late fifteenth-century rediscovery of Nero's Domus Aurea, whose preserved subterranean frescoes sparked a European craze for the grotesque: literally, art of the grotto. The visual arts of the following centuries teemed with re-creations (or imagined confabulations) of this prior idiom, which interwove inter alia flowers, stalks, stems, scrolls, fruit, tendrils, genii, satyrs, and human body parts, in fluid and elaborate designs.2 The provenance and denotation of "arabesque" is, by comparison, rather muddled. A concept often emerges in obscurity only to decay into semantic ambiguity: in the case of this term, at least so far as Anglophone culture is concerned, the gestation was rapid enough as to stifle useful cognitive work in the interim. The word is conspicuous by its absence until the very late eighteenth century: a handful of earlier encyclopedias and dictionaries employ it only as a geographic identifier, as when The Builder's Dictionary (1734) diffusely defines "arabesque" (or "arabesk") as "something done after the manner of the Arabians."3 The first systematic elaboration of the concept occurs only with the German late classicists and Frühromantiker, for whom, as Winfried Menninghaus has explored at length, it exerts an increasingly pivotal role in literary production (Ludwig Tieck's Ritter Blaubart, 1797), aesthetic theory [End Page 465] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Arabesque decorations in Raphael's Vatican loggia, in Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016), p. 459. (Karl-Phillip Mortiz, Friedrich Schlegel, and Immanuel Kant), and the plastic arts (Philipp Otto Runge's print series The Times of the Day, 1802–1810).4 Yet these varied theorizations and practices did not, on the whole, percolate into Anglophone discourse, even as the German romanticists in question used British materials so as to ground the concept—as when Schlegel treated the [End Page 466] multiple digressions of Tristram Shandy (and the shaking of Uncle Toby's stick) under the rubric of novelistic arabesque.5 A pan-European vogue for "Orientalized" design, along with this half-digested diet of German aesthetics, did allow the term to spread in Anglophone culture through the nineteenth century, albeit without overmuch consistency. The successive editions of John Henry Parker's glossary of architectural terms neatly demonstrate the shifts in the term: in 1838, he interchanges "grotesque" and "arabesque," concluding rather unhelpfully that neither should be used; by 1840, a fuller entry anchors the device in the Islamic prohibition on representation of the human figure, concluding, "Arabesque ornament in sculpture, if not kept very low in relief, is apt to become grotesque"; by 1850, he has abandoned all attempt to disarticulate the two terms.6 Alongside "arabesque's" comparably vague semantic neighbor "moresque," the term thereby typically represents a conceptual porridge of one or more of the following: (a) exotic Orientalism; (b) abstraction; (c) serial pattern; (d) fantastical imagination. The conjunction became proverbial enough for Edgar Allan Poe to famously employ it as the title designation for one of his collections of short stories...

Fantastic Consumption and the Utopia of Self‐Cannibalism in Ludwig Tieck's Des Lebens Überfluß

Consumption is a central problem in Ludwig Tieck's 1838 novella Des Lebens Überfluß. This essay argues that autosarcophagy stands at the imaginary core of a utopian project of secession from nineteenth century social and material relations. Beginning with the tale of the self‐devouring criminal that Heinrich relates at the beginning of the novella, eating as a bodily act structures the novella's confrontation with the legacies of German Romanticism and Idealism and the problem of living a decommodified life in an emerging global capitalist order. By exploring the text's utopianism, this essay illuminates the story's more radical political stakes while also situating the novella relative to nineteenth century concerns on the philosophical dimensions of eating.

Shakespeare and the Romantics

Shakespeare and the Romantics

Linguistic Representation of the Idea of Dialectic Movement in the Way Motif in the Novel "Franz Sternbald’s Journey" by Ludwig Tieck

Linguistic Representation of the Idea of Dialectic Movement in the Way Motif in the Novel "Franz Sternbald’s Journey" by Ludwig Tieck

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

The Early Romantic Comedy of Aesthetic Disobedience

This article exposes a tension between politics and aesthetics in the development of early Romantic comedy. In his essay ‘Vom ästhetischen Wert der griechischen Komödie’ (1794), Friedrich Schlegel states that Aristophanes’ Old Comedy evoked pleasure by transgressing societal norms, thereby epitomizing civic liberty. Deviating from Schlegel’s political vision of the comedy, the humour of early Romantic comedies is primarily based upon the transgression of the aesthetic rule of the fourth wall, as Clemens Brentano’s Gustav Wasa (1800) and Ludwig Tieck’s Prolog (1796) illustrate. Looking at Schlegel’s dualistic anthropology, which suggests that the audience is not prepared for a comedy that challenges norms as long as they cannot control their sensuality, closes the ostensible discrepancy between Schlegel and the Romantic playwrights’ preoccupation with the fourth wall. The aesthetic disobedience of early Romantic playwrights can thus be seen as an endeavour to represent liberty without appealing to the sensuality of the audience.

Romanticism: Characteristics, Themes and Poets

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence.
 The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe.
 Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse.
 The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase.
 The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Language Representation of Romantic Duality in the Novel by Ludwig Tieck

Language Representation of Romantic Duality in the Novel by Ludwig Tieck

Romantic Elements in Tieck’s Fairy Tale Der Blonde Eckbert: The Opposite and Unity of Reality and Illusion

Ludwig Tieck is regarded as a representative of German romantic literature, and his works include novels, novellas and fairy tales. His fairy tale Der Blonde Eckbert is one of the most important artistic fairy tales in the German Romantic period and has an important position in the history of German literature. The theme of this work is the praise of “Waldeinsamkeit”, condemning behaviors against nature and criticizing the inflated desire. Tieck created an ideal world through imaginary characters, strange birds, puppies and forests, and used this to criticize the dark side of society. Based on Der Blonde Eckbert, this article uses the method of text analysis to study the relationship between reality and fantasy from two aspects. From the perspective of “Waldeinsamkeit” and the relationship between man and nature, it studies how the two are harmoniously unified.

Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk

Reviewed by: Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk Daniel Purdy Stefan Hajduk, Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 513 pp. The notion of Stimmung is in the air, it is all around us. After having been pushed aside in the late twentieth century, Stimmung has returned as a priority for architecture, city planning, environmentalism, and literary criticism. The term has become the progressive angle from which diverse movements have sought to reverse the functionality of modernism without falling into retrograde traditionalism. The eighteenth-century affinity for nurturing Stimmung, first articulated in landscape gardening and sentimental prose, has been mobilized into a more active climate awareness, both local and global. Stefan Hajduk's massive Poetologie der Stimmung covers much more than the literature of the early Goethezeit, as it addresses the 250-year history of scholars who have sought to characterize the illusive quality. He engages earnestly with Leo Spitzer's articles on Stimmung's relation to ancient ideas of cosmological harmony while proposing Heidegger's Befindlichkeit as conceptually superior to nineteenth-century aesthetic articulations. He is also fully conversant with Gernot Böhme's more recent appeal to foster Atmosphäre in architecture. Most importantly for Goethe scholars, Hajduk builds his argument on David Wellbery's definitive essay on the subject in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe, providing interpretations and examples that augment Wellbery's reconstruction of the term's semantic field. For all his thoroughness, Wellbery's succinct review of Goethe's remarks on Stimmung leaves room for many more investigations into the term's poetic use around Strasbourg and Weimar. Hajduk's book takes up the challenge by finding diverse forms of Stimmung in the early Goethezeit, not just those that proffer a lyrical perception of nature. The core of Hajduk's book is organized around lengthy close interpretations of three texts: Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Karl Philipp Moritz's Andreas Hartknopf novels, and Ludwig Tieck's short drama, "Der Abschied." [End Page 362] Hajduk agrees with Wellbery's opening claim that the difficulty in translating Stimmung into other European languages reflects the manner in which the German term integrates both subjective and objective references. Stimmung appears both within the perceiving individual as well as in the surrounding environment. "Mood" and "atmosphere" capture different portions but by no means the full range of aesthetic connotations in Stimmung. Because the term is often invoked in such a manner as to take advantage of its rich metaphorical allusions, no single other word comes close to its fullness. Agreeing with Wellbery's Begriffsgeschichte, Hajduk reviews the many connotations of Stimmung, landing at the conclusion that "mood," "milieu," "ambience," "atmosphere," or "attunement" do not adequately correspond to the word's musical-cosmological resonance nor its indeterminate sense of an emotional landscape. Demonstrating the inadequacy of many translation choices makes clear how many diverse and complex connotations are carried by the word. Indirectly, both Wellbery and Hajduk underscore the distinctiveness of the German word. For both scholars, contextual usage remains vital to understanding the particular meanings invoked at any given instance. Wellbery refrains from offering a conceptual definition but turns instead to a history of its metaphorical application. In this regard, both critics agree with Spitzer that Stimmung's lexical career takes off in the eighteenth century. In building off his predecessors, Hajduk points out that Wellbery's focus on aesthetic theory serves an entirely different purpose than Spitzer's reconstruction of cosmology. Hajduk goes further than Spitzer and Wellbery in highlighting the inadequacy of all translations and conceptualizations of Stimmung to argue that philosophical definitions around 1800 were ultimately incomplete and poetic articulations increasingly subjective, thereby losing the term's spatial and natural dimensions. For Wellbery, the indeterminacy is a source of fruitful variation, whereas Hajduk sees a problem that ultimately requires Heidegger to provide an adequate answer. Contrary to Wellbery's conceptual history, Hajduk argues that from Kant to Humboldt, Stimmung loses its position within the aesthetic space of nature as something external to the subject, such as a musical tone or atmosphere—decisive connotations for Goethe, Moritz, and Tieck. The poetic texts Hajduk cites...