SOURCE: "Kleist's Novellen: Narration as Drama?" in Momentum Dramaticum: Festschrift for Eckehard Catholy, edited by Linda Dietrick and David G. John, University of Waterloo Press, 1990, pp. 289-303.

In the following excerpt, Dietrick assesses the dramatic elements in Kleist's short fiction.

It was once a virtual commonplace for critics to observe that Kleist's tales—or Novellen, as the tradition has come to designate what he simply called Erzählungen—have a "dramatic" quality about them. In a famous interpretation of "Das Bettelweib von Locarno," the most prominent of those critics, Emil Staiger [in Meisterwerke deutscher Sprache aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhandert, 1942], wrote of this quality almost as if it were a matter of consensus among observant readers, something that one would expect from a dramatist of such stature or, indeed, from a writer devoted to the Novelle, if one assumes this to be the most dramatic of epic forms. Staiger's...