German Novella

Originating with Boccaccio during the Italian Renaissance, the novella, a cyclical collection of frame stories in prose, quickly inspired many imitations in Italy, France, Spain and Great Britain. However, it was not widely used in Germany until the end of the eighteenth century, when, inspired by Goethe, the genre retained the original medium but abandoned the cyclical format; after this, it rapidly grew in popularity, dominating the nineteenth century literary scene, and became the object of much artistic and critical speculation. The orthodox theory of the novella, formulated by Goethe, Tieck, and Heyse in the previous century, has sharply divided the critical establishment; defended in modern times by such scholars as McBurney Mitchell, Hermann Pongs, Johannes Klein, Martin Swales, and Henry Remak, it has been sharply attacked by others, including Oskar Walzel, Harry Steinhauer, John Ellis, and Karl Konrad Pohlheim. The axiomatic assumption that the novella form exists as an independent, identifiable genre has been undermined to such an extent that one school of thought declares there to be no such genre. The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism is the only work in English or German that illuminates the main currents of theory formation, evaluation, and revaluation from its inception with Wieland to the present, tracing a path through the huge amount of critical material devoted to the novella. ~~ SIEGFRIED WEING (April 8, 1942-October 10, 2004) was professor of German language and literature at the Virginia Military Institute for 36 years.