German Gothic Literature: Origins, Adaptations, Transformations

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 no...