ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the work including the collection of narrative and dramatic writing, Phantasus. Both of Ludwig Tieck's major romantic novels, Die Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell and Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, are studies in depth of the romantic temperament and its problems. William Lovell is a thoroughly pessimistic work. It is a story of mental and moral decline, in which structural elements of the 'Bundesroman' are grafted on to the basic journey-pattern. The motif of 'entering' is present in all the stories. Tieck prefers to work in the border-area and to oscillate, in fact, between the supernatural and psychological. He is the creator of the 'Märchen-Novelle', a form to be perfected by E. T. A Hoffmann, in which the inner processes of the Gemüt tend to be the dominant interest. The pessimistic ending is the more characteristic in Tieck's case –in itself, perhaps, a sign of the reservations which he had, as a romantic, about the romantic way.
