The Marquise of O--
Subtitle: and other stories
By: Heinrich von Kleist ; translated and with an introduction by David Luke and Nigel Reeves.
Series: Penguin classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1985
Place of publication: England
Language: eng; ger
Number of pages: 319
Work titles: Selected stories.
Description: From 'The Marquis of O--', in which a woman is made pregnant without her knowledge, to the vivid and inexplicable suffering portrayed in 'The Earthquake in Chile', his stories are those of a man swimming against the tide of the German Enlightenment, unable to believe in the idealistic humanism of his day, and who sees human nature as irrational, ambiguous and baffling. It is this loss of faith, together with his vulnerability and disequilibrium, his pronounced sense of evil, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carries Kleist more forcefully than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and today.
Notes: Reprint. Originally published: 1978.