One of the ways in which German Romanticism responds to the crisis of the Age of Reason is by reinventing enchantment and setting it to work as the notion of poetic enchantment. The exigency of that reinvention and its significance for the post-Romantic period underscore the principal concerns of the present dissertation. This study revisits the Romantic notion of poetic enchantment and addresses the transformation of Romantic themes into narrative techniques by closely investigating seminal texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gottfried Keller, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I assert that the post-Romantic period responds to the Romantic notion of poetic enchantment in two stages: (1) by introducing operations of disenchantment and demystification, and (2) in terms of the emergence of existentialist, and, eventually, psychoanalytical currents in literature that appropriate both Romantic enchantment and post-Romantic demystification.

As fantastic genre becomes an option for representing psychological reality, some Romantic authors use the terms “fantastic” and “poetic” interchangeably. My first chapter, “Magnetic Poetics,” offers a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fairy-tale “Der goldne Topf” that analyzes the German Romantics’ interest in enchantment as a poetic device which, they hope, can supersede normative limitations imposed on knowledge. The subsequent chapters address the two stages in which post-Romantic literature reacts to this approach. The second chapter, “Buying Fat from a Cat, discusses Keller’s fairy-tale “Spiegel, das Kätzchen” as an example of the first stage that criticizes Romanticism for its disregard for purported reality. The third chapter, “Enchanted Confessions,” focuses on Dostoevsky’s early novel Netochka Nezvanova as a unique manifestation of the second stage. Analyzing traces of enchantment in the development of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic narrative style, this chapter addresses a continuity between the Romantic treatment of psychic phenomena and Dostoevsky’s exploration of human consciousness. With this dissertation, I hope to explore a rational dimension of Romanticism and an element of magic in Realism. The latter, I claim, survives as both a technical device (frame narratives) and as a rethinking of psychological reality (Dostoevsky’s psychoanalysis avant la lettre).