Like any engagement with literature that is not part of the established canon, a study dealing with the dramatic work of Fouqué (1777-1843) will at the same time be part of the literary history of 'minor works'. The study does not set out, however, to rehabilitate unjustly neglected writings. The material is of interest above all for what it has to tell us about the poetic consequences of (early) Romantic theories of literature and genre. Accordingly, the study concentrates first of all on Fouqué's early dramatic works as an attempt to write an allegorical species of Welttheater, moving from there to examine next his dramatic approach to the New Mythology, then the patriotic and historical dramas against the backdrop of the temporalization of political awareness, the medieval dramas in the context of the institutionalization of Germanic Studies, and finally the problem of the Gesamtkunstwerk with its structural proximity to opera and Romantic drama.