Product Description
The Rider of the White Horse is a classic German novella, in which the individual wrestles with the mass, the man with the most elementary forces of nature. The scene of the novella is characterized with vividness in its setting of marsh and sea, it glorifies love, and at the same time it touches themes which deeply occupied Storm, such as the problem of heredity or the relation between father and son. Happiness is won, but it ends in tragedy. It is a man of sober intellect who tells the whole story - and yet, like human life itself, it stands out against a mystic background. Remembrance of long ago has clarified everything.It is Storm's last complete work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Fury of the North Sea
If you've managed to pass several semesters of college German, you've almost certainly encountered Theodor Storm (1817-1888) in the original. He's as venerated a classic of German literature as Maupassant of French or Turgenev of Russian, and like those two masters, his finest works were 'novellas' -- long short stories with certain formal structural elements. Storm was extremely well-known to American and English readers in the 19th Century, but his fame has faded during the 20th. This translation of eight of his fifty-plus stories, including his acknowledged masterpiece "Der Schimmelreiter - The Rider on the White Horse", by the American poet James Wright, makes a convincing case that Storm's work is still worth reading.

Like Goethe, Storm spent much of his energy in public life. He was a jurist by training. As a young 'nationalist' on behalf of the German-speaking population of Danish-governed Schleswig, Storm was vociferous enough to get exiled to Prussia, and then to a mountain village in Thuringia, where he worked as a judge and wrote many of his novellas. In 1864, Prussia seized control of Schleswig and Storm hurried home to be acclaimed as "Landsvogt" in his native region, an administrative position responsible for civil order and justice. Eventually, despite personal tragedies, he rose to the position of Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals.

No one ever wrote love stories more redolent of spring blossoms and sunshine than Theodor Storm. His prose in such tales is as mellow as vintage Riesling. For a man with feet planted stoutly in the running of life in the present, Storm had a musician's ear for the language of nostalgia. The closest comparison in American literature might be to Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, without the nagging Puritan guilt. Once in a while, mystery verging on the supernatural colors some of Storm's scenes, and even more rarely a trace of mockery of rustic life appears.

After the gentle climate of Storm's early stories, however, in The Rider on the White Horse, he lives up to his surname. That ninety page story is set among the dikes and dunes of Frisia, on the edge of the North Sea; it portrays the indefatigable struggle of folk against the fury of waves and weather, to preserve their hard-won reclaimed soil. It's also a kind of Faust/Prometheus story, of a man who triumphs and loses in the same act. It's a powerful, passionate story, one of the most evocative in any language. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the fourth selection of novellas in the translator's definitive series of translations of a major 19th-century German writer. `The Last Farmstead' and the title-story depict reversals of fortune for farming and burgher families in the economic aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. `The Swallows of St George's' is a poignant love story and a narrative tour de force. In the high-spirited `By the Fireside' a teller of ghost stories finally wins over an initially skeptical audience. The first-and last-mentioned stories appear in English for the first time. Denis Jackson won the 2005 Oxford Weidenfeld Translationprize for his previous volume of Storm translations, Paul the Puppeteer. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Essays from an international symposium in Cardiff in 1997. Biographical and critical social interpretations alternate with structural and psychoanalytic readings and should provide new insights into the "Novellen". ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more