Among the abundance of scholarship treating the Romantic Kunstmarchen, Gordon Birrell's The Boundless Present constitutes a significant and original contribution. The importance of the study. . . is derived not solely from the ingenuity of Birrell's spatial and temporal approach to selected Kunstmarchen by Novalis and Tieck. Rather, the particular success of this study lies equally in its contribution to our understanding of the Romantic Kunstmarchen as a genre, based on the author's convincing extrapolations from the specific works treated here." - MLN