Goethe, Tieck, Fouque, Brentano: Romantic Fairy Tales

The four works collected in this volume reveal the fascinating preoccupations of the German Romantic movement, which revelled in the inexplicable, the uncanny and the unknown and, especially, the mysterious world of the fairy tale. Goethe's richly imaginative Fairy Tale (1795) depicts an ethereal underground realm and the marriage of a beautiful man and woman, whose union heralds a new age. In Tieck's Eckbert the Fair (1797) two outsiders seek refuge in the solitude of dark woods to conceal their incestuous passion from the world, while in Fouqué's Undine (1811) a water nymph falls in love and acquires a soul, and so discovers the reality of human suffering. And Brentano's Tale of Honest Casper and Fair Annie (1817) portrays the tragedy of a young couple, destroyed by a false sense of honour and pride.

Carol Tully was born in Galashiels, Scotland. After gaining a BA from the University of Strathclyde, she went on to take her PhD at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. Before taking up her current post as lecturer in German at the University of Wales Bangor, she taught at King's College, London and the University of Leeds. As well as writing on nineteenth-century women's literature in Germany, Tully is the author of Creating a National Identity: A Comparative Study of German and Spanish Romanticism.