NOVALIS

The article examines the dominant concepts of the body in German Romanticism: the body-microcosm, the body-machine and the body-sign. On the material of the works of LA. von Arnim and ETA Hoffman analyzes the tendency towards the growth of mechanistic character in late romanticism, which leads to the disintegration of the body image into separate "parts", and the influence of physiognomy, which is intended to compensate for the lost harmony of the soul and body and to determine the correspondence between the inner and the outer.

The principle of uniting stories within a collection of stories is viewed as the composition center. The paper deals with the problems of trespassing the borderlines established by culture, the character’s self-knowledge and poetics of radically broadening the meaningful volume of an image by means of developing the plot and particular motives that create the framework of world culture spiritual values.