Le degenerazioni dell’anima bella nel Romanticismo tedesco

The article deals with the corruption and the degeneration of the schöne Seele (“beautiful soul”) in its double images, i.e. the schöne Leiche (“beautiful corpse”) and the vampiric Totenbraut (“corpse bride”), during German late Romanticism. In order to analyse the features and the aesthetical and religious meanings of the degeneration of the beautiful soul, the first part of the article highlights the reasons for the religious belief of the blood as the siege of human soul and discusses it within the debate on the vampire that spread in Austria and Germany during the Eighteenth Century. By focussing on specific works of the period – J.W. Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Vampirismus and T. Hildebrand’s Der Vampyr – the second part of the essay investigates the literary features of the decadence of the beautiful soul with particular respect to the figure of the female vampire.