SOURCE: "The Character of Kleist Criticism," in Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in the Character and Meaning of His Writings, The University of North Carolina Press, 1979, pp. 143-64.

Ellis is an English educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he presents a thorough survey of critical scholarship on Kleist's short fiction, and discusses the varying interpretations of several Kleist novellas and stories.

Abstracting motifs and ideas from their context in individual works is .. . a more than usually dangerous procedure in Kleist criticism since his works demand a close attention to their twists and turns. The very notion of a context is more complicated in works that continually change direction, and in which an idea can seem to have positive value on one page but be revalued later on. It is fruitless for the critic to try to trace a motif through all Kleist's works as if the motif had...