ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the opportunities, afforded by the Novelle, are exploited by the principal romantic practitioners of the two genres. It examines the stories of Heinrich von Kleist who will be found to stand in a special relationship to the Romantic Movement. The Novelle and Märchen are both forms in which the romantics produced work of distinction. The romantics as a group knew that such total spiritual freedom demands an ability to live in a highly rarefied atmosphere which few possess, and they indulged themselves in this but seldom. Very little of Fouqué's writing still appeals and even in his own day, when he enjoyed a period of great popularity with the broad mass of the reading public, there were those among the romantics who could not take him quite seriously. Kleist's Novellen, composed during the period 1805-10, were published in their final form in two volumes under the title Erzählungen.
