SOURCE: “Psychological Insight and Moral Awareness in Grillparzer's Das goldene Vliess,” Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 3, 1980, pp. 575-82.

In the following essay, McInnes explores the tension between analytical insight and moral concern in Das goldene Vliess, emphasizing that Grillparzer's imagination operated outside the conscious level of action. McInnes further suggests that Grillparzer anticipated later and more radical developments in nineteenth-century German drama.

The dramatic work of Grillparzer has proved notoriously difficult to relate to the wider development of German literature in the nineteenth century.¹ It is not that links with the main literary movements are hard to establish, but rather that those that present themselves seem so diverse and mutually incompatible. It was, for instance, as easy for the Naturalists to show that he was a significant forerunner of their own radical concerns as it was for Gundolf to contend with some conviction that he was a mere...