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Author: John Thomas Blair
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Fresh critical reading of Goethe's important novel, challenging orthodox scholarship. In this new reading of Goethe's most influential novel Blair's close attention to the text brings startling insights to light, often taking issue with received critical opinions. He shows, for example, that Goethe slyly introducedmaterial full of low-cultural, subversive vitality that mocks conservative, authoritarian power interested in conformity or propriety. The novel does not just find fault with developments of the late Enlightenment but rather seductively describes loci of resistance to them: the marketplace, the travelling theatre, the Hanswurst. Equally, the author argues that although 'high' aesthetics, morals, institutions and rationality are impugned, they are not completely discredited: the problem with such high principles is demonstrated as being their tendency to present themselves as the only valid voice.
Author: John Thomas Blair
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fresh critical reading of Goethe's important novel, challenging orthodox scholarship. In this new reading of Goethe's most influential novel Blair's close attention to the text brings startling insights to light, often taking issue with received critical opinions. He shows, for example, that Goethe slyly introducedmaterial full of low-cultural, subversive vitality that mocks conservative, authoritarian power interested in conformity or propriety. The novel does not just find fault with developments of the late Enlightenment but rather seductively describes loci of resistance to them: the marketplace, the travelling theatre, the Hanswurst. Equally, the author argues that although 'high' aesthetics, morals, institutions and rationality are impugned, they are not completely discredited: the problem with such high principles is demonstrated as being their tendency to present themselves as the only valid voice.
Author: Sarah V. Eldridge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190859288
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
In the decades after its publication, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, and Schlegel, and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following, the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe's long and complicated novel is doing, and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel's engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality, development, and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender, sexuality, and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended, creative, and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential, and into the projects of one Germany's greatest writers.
Author: Jane Veronica Curran
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The first detailed reader's commentary on one of the seminal works of world literature. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is commonly acknowledged to have played a pivotal role in founding the genre known as the Bildungsroman. Although a wealth of critical material has accumulated since its publication in 1795-96, a detailed commentary in English on this novel of `apprenticeship' has been lacking from the corpus. Jane V. Curran's full-length commentary fills this gap. In her analysis, Curran presents the standard material familiar from traditional commentaries, but includes passages hitherto neglected, presenting new insights in a new form. Curran stresses the importance of narrative techniques, traces the development of the characters, and draws the reader'sattention to the intertextual echoes, the use of symbols, and the many instances of irony. Curran also points out parallels between Wilhelm Meister's experiences and Goethe's life, and illuminates contemporary issues that are touched on in the novel, particularly the development of the German theater. The book provides notes with additional information for the interpretation of Goethe's work, including factual details of general interest, scholarly sources, and background information. This is a vade mecum not only for students of Goethe and of German literature, but also for all those interested in the development of the Bildungsroman. Jane V. Curran is chair of the German Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Author: Lauren Nossett
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810139316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
The Virginal Mother in German Culture presents an innovative and thorough analysis of the contradictory obsession with female virginity and idealization of maternal nature in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Lauren Nossett explores how the complex social ideal of woman as both a sexless and maternal being led to the creation of a unique figure in German literature: the virginal mother. At the same time, she shows that the literary depictions of virginal mothers correspond to vilified biological mother figures, which point to a perceived threat in the long nineteenth century of the mother’s procreative power. Examining the virginal mother in the first novel by a German woman (Sophie von La Roche), canonical texts by Goethe, nineteenth-century popular fiction, autobiographical works, and Thea von Harbou’s novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang’s film by the same name, this book highlights the virginal mother at pivotal moments in German history and cultural development: the entrance of women into the literary market, the Goethezeit, the foundation of the German Empire, and the volatile Weimar Republic. The Virginal Mother in German Culture will be of interest to students and scholars of German literature, history, cultural and social studies, and women’s studies.
Author: Melvyn New
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896724518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.
Author: Lesley Sharpe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Goethe provides a challenging yet accessible survey of this versatile figure, not only one of the world's greatest writers but also a theatre director and art critic, a natural scientist and state administrator. The volume places Goethe in the context of the Germany and Europe of his lifetime. His literary work is covered in individual chapters on poetry, drama (with a separate chapter on Faust), prose fiction and autobiography. Other chapters deal with his work in the Weimar Theatre, his friendship with Schiller, his scientific studies and writings, his engagement with the visual arts, with religion and philosophy, the controversies surrounding his political standpoint and the impact of feminist criticism. A wide-ranging survey of reception inside and outside Germany and an extensive guide to further reading round off this volume, which will appeal to students and specialists alike.
Author: Frederick Amrine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108806872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Goethe's Willhelm Meister novels, widely held to be the most significant and influential in all of German literature, have traditionally been classed as Bildungsroman, or 'novels of formation'. In Goethe and the Myth of Bildungsroman, Frederick Amrine offers a unique reading of Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre, which posits the second novel as a sequel to the first. Deconstructing and jettisoning the notion of the Bildungsroman, the features of the novels which have historically proved problematic for critics, seeming to testify to the novels' disunity, become instead the articulation points of a subtle concord between thematic and formal elements. Reading the novels in light of the eminent criticism of Northrop Frye, this book productively shifts away from social commentary towards the archetypal and symbolic, showing Goethe not to be an exception within world literature; rather, that he participates deeply in its overarching structures.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004362215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
This volume investigates the impact of the Radical Enlightenment on German culture during the eighteenth century, taking recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure. The collection documents the cultural dimension of the debate on the Radical Enlightenment. In a series of readings of known and lesser-known fictional and essayistic texts, individual contributors show that these can be read not only as articulating a conflict between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, but also as documents of a debate about the precise nature of Enlightenment. At stake is the question whether the Enlightenment should aim to be an atheist, materialist, and political movement that wants to change society, or, in spite of its belief in rationality, should respect monarchy, aristocracy, and established religion. Contributors are: Mary Helen Dupree, Sean Franzel, Peter Höyng, John A. McCarthy, Monika Nenon, Carl Niekerk, Daniel Purdy, William Rasch, Ann Schmiesing, Paul S. Spalding, Gabriela Stoicea, Birgit Tautz, Andrew Weeks, Chunjie Zhang
Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107493897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475
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Book Description
A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each essay examines an author's use of, and contributions to, the genre and also engages an important aspect of the form, such as its relation to romance or one of its sub-genres, such as the Bildungsroman. Larger theoretical questions are introduced through specific readings of exemplary novels. Taking a broad historical and geographic view, the essays keep in mind the role the novel itself has played in the development of European national identities and in cultural history over the last four centuries. While conveying essential introductory information for new readers, these authoritative essays reflect up-to-date scholarship and also review, and sometimes challenge, conventional accounts.
Author: John Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351191977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
"This book addresses three key areas of intellectual enquiry: literary criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical theology. Once closely related, especially in the Catholic tradition, they often appear to be separate and unconnected domains in the modern university. The work of Nicholas Boyle is one of the most significant recent attempts to reconnect them. Responding to that initiative, The Present Word challenges this fragmentation of knowledge. Several of the essays reflect a major change of emphasis in literary studies over the last two decades: the reconnection of an idea of literary criticism closely related to the experience of reading, and the wider societal and political concerns addressed by Cultural Studies. Contributors also debate, from both perspectives, whether theological concepts can illuminate the secular culture in which literature is written and read. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London, where he served as Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture from 2006-2009."
