Univ., Diss.--Hamburg, 2000. / Literaturverz. S. 673 - 681.

The aim of this comparative study of Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen , Holderlin's Hyperion, and Schlegel's Lucinde is to develop a comprehensive overview of the role of woman in conceptions of male subjectivity in Early German Romanticism. The reading of the novels developed here examines the Early Romantic poetics with a specific view to the conceptualizations of woman contained therein. The Early Romantic 'Project' consists in the rewriting of the subject and the world in the medium of poetry. Tanscendental poetry, the fragment, allegory, and irony are intended to invoke the presence of an absence, that is the absolute. In the concrete praxis in the novels, these concepts of Early Romantic poetics imply conceptualizations of woman. They articulate a specific approach in the encounter of the male subject with the female object. At the center of Romantic poetics lies the encounter with woman. The unique situatedness of the romantic subject is, indeed, crystallized in this encounter. / Early Romanticism is situated between Kant and Hegel. The post-Kantian subject experiences a crisis of legitimation. Lacking an unmediated access to the object, it is fragmented and threatened. Early Romanticism, however, also prefigures Hegel, inasmuch as the crisis does not consist in the loss of the object, but rather in the encounter of two subjects. The three novels are juxtaposed here because this position between the loss of the object and the crisis of the encounter with the other as subject leads to a paradoxical conceptualization of woman as an uncanny object of desire. In all three novels, the constitution of the male subject and the possibility of poetry depend on the encounter with woman. However, the possibility of woman emerging, indeed, as subject represents an extreme threat. As a consequence, the constitution of the male poetic subject requires the simultaneous assimilation of femininity and the shielding against woman. Hence, the three novels are love stories that narrate the death of woman. However, woman is fundamentally uncanny because even the presence of the dead woman represents a threat. The constitution of the male subject and novel unfolds, therefore, in three stages; the encounter with woman, the assimilation of femininity and death of woman, and the removal of any traces of that death.

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In this thesis, I examine three works of modern German fantasy fiction for young adults, their common grounding in the Romantic aesthetic framework and in particular the Romantic notion of creativity, and the implication of their unique fantasy fiction paradigm in our modern day. The novels are Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979), Inkheart (2003) by Cornelia Funke and The City of Dreaming Books (2006) by Walter Moers. They represent a Germany-specific narrative paradigm which can be seen in the protagonist readers’ transformation from mere readers into storymakers/storytellers, and in the conflict between a book-loving hero and antagonists who are against literature. The protagonists embody the Romantic notion of creativity that involves the sublimation of a poet’s crisis into an exploration of the self. The mundane is infused with fantasy, thereby elevating reality to an idealised state. These Romantic storytelling readers act as tricksters, a fairy tale archetype that shares similarities with the figure of the Romantic poet. I employ the theoretical frameworks of German Romanticism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and postmodern models, including those by Deleuze and Guattari. I argue for a modern version of the trickster archetype which explains how a complacent, passive reader becomes an active storyteller. / Graduate