Böcker av John M. Ellis

Ellis's book confronts directly the most central issue of Kleist criticism: the essential nature and meaning of his work. Rather than provide a general survey of Kleist's writings, Ellis performs an analysis of six of his most mature works, drawing some general conclusions about the uniquely Kleistian character of the works covered.

In this text, John Ellis seeks to subject the fashionable notions that now dominate college curricula in the humanities to a careful historical and logical analysis. The result is a critique and rebuttal of the claims made for the reigning orthodoxy.

The main body of this book is devoted to interpretative essays on individual Novellen by Kleist, Tieck, Hoffmann, Grillparzwe, Keller, Storm, Hauptmann and Kafka. In a sense they all illustrate one central problem: the relationship of the narrator to his story, and the importance of this relationship for its interpretation.