The Knowledge of Romantic Poetics

The tale's emphasized novelty is manifold. Its action takes place not in a faraway land or mythical past but in Dresden, where Hoffmann moved in March 1813 to work as musical director for Joseph Seconda's opera company. He repopulates the Saxon capital with all kinds of fantastic personages who had been personae non grata during the Age of Enlightenment, rehabilitating fairies, witches and elemental spirits as voices of nature and poetry, and thereby continuing the Romantic tradition that challenged the folkloristic monopoly on the German fairy-tale. Wilhelm Grimm, who worked especially hard to excise any sexual or "indecent" references from the folk tales in order to make them safe for pedagogical use. This disdain is understandable. The Brothers Grimm's collecting of folk tales served to extract the fantastic element from reality and confine it within the book covers. The Romantics, on the contrary, made constituent frameworks of the book so amorphous that enchantment once again returned to the world.