Ludwig Tieck: Meandros Góticos

Abstract

Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was a pioneer of German Romanticism alongside figures such as Novalis, Wackenroder, brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling. A great admirer of Shakespeare and Calderón de la Barca, Tieck envisioned literature as a supranational terrain and an area of convergence of different traditions and perspectives. Thus he absorbed numerous elements from popular culture (fairy tales, legends, superstitions) and merged with the trends of his time, among which the mid eighteenth-century gothic and horror narrative. In Tieck the macabre becomes an expression of questions about the relationship between the subject and on the very notion (based on common sense) that there would be a single reality and independent from the point of view of who observes or describes. Tieck aesthetically formulated questions that echoed throughout German romanticism, expressing concerns and anxieties inseparable from his poetic and literary production.