Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology : Man and Other Plants Hardback
by Matthew (Lecturer in German, Lecturer in German, King's College, London) Bell
Part of the Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs series
Hardback
Description
For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition.
In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed.
The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Englightment - to the emergence of his own theory of `empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahverwandtschaften.
In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehriahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Engligtenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahllverwandtschaften.
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:356 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/08/1994
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198158943
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:356 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/08/1994
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198158943
