In many ways Goethe does not strike one as a born storyteller. There is little in his prose fiction of that teeming materiality we have come to expect from the great European novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the narrative mode evidently meant a great deal to him because he wrote prose fiction throughout his long creative life. And he was a remarkably sophisticated witness to the emergence of the various forms of modern narrativity, particularly the novel.

Admittedly the tradition of German novel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which he helps to inaugurate does not figure in the pantheon of established European ‘classics’. Within the broad compass of narrative realism, with its wholehearted acknowledgement of the omnipresence of social life, German fiction tends to figure as at best a marginal presence. But all the same it has valuable insights to offer; most particularly, German writing of this period sustains and is sustained by an urgent dimension of reflectivity, one which invests the narrative process with an unmistakable intensity of theoretical self-commentary. Three of Goethe’s theoretical comments on fiction can serve to focus the particular contribution he makes to this tradition.