SOURCE: “How Seriously Should We take Goethe's Definition of the Novelle?,” in Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America, Vol. 3, 1986, pp. 121-23.

In the following essay, Ellis contends that Goethe's Novelle should not be considered the standard-bearer for the genre in general.

No definition of the Novelle has been quoted more often, or examined and interpreted more industriously, than that of Goethe: “Was ist eine Novelle anders, als eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit?”¹ It may not seem surprising that every nuance of this utterance has been scrutinized with the greatest diligence, even though the formulation is Eckermann's from memory, and some of those nuances may be due to him. Anything that seems to be the considered view, by Germany's greatest poet, of that genre of literature which is most distinctively German in the modern period, must necessarily attract a good deal of attention—whether...