Synopses & Reviews
Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was a major figure in German cultural life, a poet, playwright, and novelist who was also an influential art and theater critic, the editor of Kleist and Novalis, and the prime force behind the famous Schegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare. His was a long and prolific career, which began in the last decades of Frederick the Great's reign, and ended in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, and his varied literary output reflected the progress and the shifting emphasis of the Romantic movement. In this biography, Roger Paulin attempts to capture, through the study of the work of this remarkable man, the climate of Romanticism, tracing its progress from a movement of aesthetic protest to one of national awareness.
Review
"The best biography of Tieck in any language....Will remain the standard life of Tieck for many years to come; and students of 19th-century literature and society, and of Anglo-German cultural relations in the age of Weltliteratur will ignore it at their peril."--Times Literary Supplement
"Brings to his endeavor a prodigious familiarity with Tieck's life, his works, and with unpublished archival materials....Paulin's biography will certainly provide a major reference point in Tieck scholarship for some time."--Studies in Romanticism
"Paulin's book is a major contribution to our understanding of the role played by Tieck in the Romantic Movement and in German literature and culture from the 1790s to the middle of the nineteenth century." --Journal of English and Germanic Philology
Paulin's warts-and-all biography is a refreshing as it is thorough."--The Romantic Movement
"Any school at which German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is taught will wish to have this book in its library....Both an authoritative biography and a major contribution to our understanding of the 'Goethezeit.'"--Treffpunkt