This is a critical account of one of the most individual and highly developed genres in German literature. The novella may be defined as a narrative in prose, usually short, dealing with one striking fateful event and distinguished by careful artistry of presentation. The book begins by analyzing the features which mark off the novelle from its relatives, the novel and short story; it then describes the different forms and structures which the novelle has assumed under the great prosaists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this edition Professor Waidson has extended the account from the period of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig up to the beginning of the 1960s.