?The frequent reference to nobility in literary texts as well as in the biographies of many authors of Romanticism is astonishing - whereas around 1800 nobility as a political concept had long been on the defensive. Analyses of texts of Novalis, Tieck, Kleist, Brentano, Eichendorff etc. show that aspects of meaning of "nobility" - such as "play", "gift economy", "chivalry" and "genealogy" - contribute to the concept of self-referential Romantic poetry. Moreover, at the threshold of modern authorship, the Romanticists oscillated between nobility due to birth and aristocratic distance to the literary market.