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Challenges traditional novel scholarship that emphasizes the individual and the Bildungsroman, broadening the focus to the family and both canonical and non-canonical novels, reading them together with biological, legal and pedagogical texts.
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 em...
In essays that examine particular non-canonical works and writers in their wider cultural context, this volume "repopulates" the German Enlightenment.
This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise Imagination and Art propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for (re-) conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms.
One of the most prolific and versatile writers of all time, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) made an impact that continues to extend far beyond his native Germany. The variety of human questions and experiences treated in his works is arguably without parallel. He also had (for his era) an unusually long life, which spanned the French Revolution, the end of the Holy Roman Empire and subsequent reshaping of the German-speaking world, and the rapid onset of industrial modernity. In thirty-seven short essays, leading international scholars explore Goethe's life and times, his literary works, his activity in the realms of art, philosophy and natural science, his reception of – and indeed by – other cultures, and, finally, the resonance of his work in our time. The aim of this collection is to open as many windows as possible onto Goethe's wide-ranging intellectual and practical activity, and to give a sense of his ongoing importance.
A history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to today. Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.
Focusing on particular cases of Anglo-German exchange in the period known as the Sattelzeit (1750-1850), this volume of essays explores how drama and poetry played a central role in the development of British and German literary cultures. With increased numbers of people studying foreign languages, engaging in translation work, and traveling between Britain and Germany, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to unprecedented opportunities for intercultural encounters and transnational dialogues. While most research on Anglo-German exchange has focused on the novel, this volume seeks to reposition drama and poetry within discourses of national identity, intercultural transfer, and World Literature. The essays in the collection cohere in affirming the significance of poetry and drama as literary forms that shaped German and British cultures in the period. The essays also consider the nuanced movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.
This volume looks to core ideas defining Goethe’s work and his influence on his contemporaries and inheritors. Contributions to this volume explore his impact through ideas of organic and aesthetic formation; methods of biology, reason, becoming, and Bildung; modes of self-conscious comportment to nature, art, and the self; and conceptions of finitude and divinity. This volume underscores the interdisciplinary impact of Goethe’s thought and work. Of particular note is Goethe's unified and non-reductive account of nature, human education, social life, and reason. These contributions shed light on how Goethe's thought furthers the methodological sciences of his day while yielding resources for the grounding of theories of art in principles of idealism as well as imminent critiques of idealism through insights about organic formation and activity. The result is a compelling sense of unity through plurality. Contributors: James Conant, Richard Eldridge, Camilla Flodin, Michael Forster, Gerad Gentry, Keren Gorodeisky, Johannes Haag, Joel Lande, Lara Ostaric, Mattias Pirholt, Anne Pollok, Karin Schutjer, Allen Speight, Joan Steigerwald, Violetta Waibel, David Wellbery.
This volume explores the influence of the Socratic legacy on philosophy and literature in the Russian, East European, and Soviet contexts, including the work of Skovoroda, Radishchev, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Bely, Narbut, Bulgakov, and many others.
Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.