Introduction: Schiller and the German Novella
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
THE LITERARY PROSE WORKS of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), some among the most resonant works in his time, remain today a largely overlooked area of his oeuvre and an unrecognized link in the evolution of German short prose. Until the 1780s, the moral tale, the historical anecdote, and the nascent German Boccaccio-Cervantes-novella of Christoph Martin Wieland (“Werkchen”) were the dominant German forms of short prose in number and in theoretical prominence. Written almost entirely in his first decade as a published author, Schiller's prose works, which experiment with the same dark anthropological curiosity and moral confusion that made his first drama Die Räuber (1781, The Robbers) a sensation, mark a departure from the uncomplicated moral praise or condemnation of the moral tale, the singularly characteristic anecdote, and the frivolity of the Boccaccio-Cervantes novella, to the moral ambivalence, anthropological universality, and the grim verisimilitude of what was to become the German novella. In so doing, Schiller provided his own prose fiction with an original artistry and profile, and provided subsequent German short-prose authors with a model that makes his literary prose works significant for the literary-historical consideration of scholars and students over 200 years after his death in 1805 and on the eve of his 250th birthday in 2009. In this volume, seven of Schiller's literary prose works appear in new translations, together with five scholarly essays, in the only English collection currently in print.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Schiller's Literary Prose WorksNew Translations and Critical Essays, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008