•  The place where romantic poetry loses itself is exactly the place where the monstrous is generated in its different meanings and manifestations, as Jean Paul demonstrates before the romantic circle of Jena settled.

•  The presence of the monster in nature and its legitimation would encourage the growth of ‘monstrous’ figures and styles in Romantic literature, perceived as uncanny, perverted and even fatal.

•  Nevertheless, if the form of early romantic literature tended from an aesthetical point of view to become itself ‘monstrous’, because of its universal and progressive inclination, it should not be forgotten that the appearance of monsters in German literature is not so common in the works of the authors belonging to the circle of Jena: Novalis, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel did not actually offer literary representation of the monstrous.

•  The “marvelous” – “the supenatural accepted” (Todorov) - of the Frühromantik (First Romanticism, 1796-1800) in Jena.

•  The “fantastic marvelous” of the Romantic circle of Heidelberg (1800-1820).

•  The “fantastic uncanny” of the late Romanticism of Berlin (1820-1840).

The “fantastic marvelous” of the Romantic circle of Heidelberg (1800-1820)  

•  Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s collection of Volkslieder (‘popular songs’): Des Knaben Wundernhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn: Old German Songs’), published between 1805 and 1808.

•  Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’, 1812).

•  The romantic turning point from the “fantastic marvellous“ to the “fantastic uncanny“.

•  “in the Grimm Brothers’ later, seminal anthology, the tally of blood-drinking, child-stealing, omophagous assailants cannot be made, and the mood turns sinister. Besides the familiar stories The Juniper Tree and Hansel and Gretel, many more intriduces ravening ogres and flesh-eating witches; only occasionally will a Mother Holle perform an act of kindness“.

•  Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), p. 310.

The “fantastic uncanny” of the late Romanticism of Berlin (1820-1840).

 

•  This sinister imaginary was fundamental for the “development of the so-called black romanticism” and the disposition for the “fantastic uncanny” that chacterized it.

•  Todorov explicitly refers to the ‘uncanny’ in order to define the fantastic, since it was over the literary works of German late Romanticism that Sigmund Freud elaborated psychoanalysis. It is in particular with regard to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (‘The Sandman’, 1812) that Freud elaborated the theory of the uncanny, because it is in the works of this German Romantic writer that the monster manifestates its liminal condition as an abnormal body able to interrogate man on human nature and mind.