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
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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.
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Out of StockMore expected soonContact us for further information
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:356 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/08/1994
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198158943
£142.50
£140.13
Information
-
Out of StockMore expected soonContact us for further information
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:356 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/08/1994
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198158943