Johann Nikolas Bohl von Faber was a Hispanist and Germanist at a time when European cultural ideology was evolving from Enlightenment thought toward the new Romantic aesthetic. This book outlines and evaluates his considerable and crucial contribution to the development of European Romanticism in Spain as well as his role as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century European letters. The first full-length treatment of von Faber s life and work in its entirety, "A German Romantic in Spain "fills a significant gap in our appreciation and knowledge of Spanish Romantic thought."

The four works collected in this volume reveal the fascinating preoccupations of the German Romantic movement, which revelled in the inexplicable, the uncanny and the unknown and, especially, the mysterious world of the fairy tale. Goethe's richly imaginative Fairy Tale (1795) depicts an ethereal underground realm and the marriage of a beautiful man and woman, whose union heralds a new age. In Tieck's Eckbert the Fair (1797) two outsiders seek refuge in the solitude of dark woods to conceal their incestuous passion from the world, while in Fouque's Undine (1811) a water...

August Wilhelm Schlegel's translation of 'La devocion de la Cruz', part of a series of works by Calderon which he published between 1803 and 1809 under the title 'Spanisches Theater', was integral to the early German Romantic apotheosis of Golden Age Spain. The 1803 first edition of 'Die Andacht zum Kreuze' was warmly received by major writers including Goethe (who was privy to the manuscript prior to publication) and Schiller, as well as other early German Hispanists and translators such as Keil and Gries. Schlegel's translation, in conjunction with his aesthetic and literary criticism (in...