Goethe And His Age

Download or read book Outing Goethe & His Age written by Alice A. Kuzniar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Goethe christened the 1700's "the Century of Winckelmann" and Kant dubbed it "the Century of Frederick the Great," they invoked two notorious figures in gay history. This collection of twelve essays reclaims "the Age of Goethe"—To call upon a literary designation of roughly the same period - as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters. This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany. The literature of this era bequeathed to us the cultural inventions of Romantic love, classical femininity, the marriage partnership, and the aesthetics of beauty - all, as this volume demonstrates, via and despite the ever-resurgent erotic desire for one's own sex. In the process, it offers radically new readings of canonical authors - including Wieland, Lenz, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Kleist — in light of the eroticized same-sex relations in their works.

Download or read book Goethe and His Age written by György Lukács and published by New York : H. Fertig. This book was released on 1978 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Goethe: Life as a Work of Art written by Rüdiger Safranski and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus Reviews This “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age. A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and—as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes—a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a “fresh and authentic” (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending “artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings” of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, “[Safranski’s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy” of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe’s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

Download or read book Goethe written by Nicholas Boyle and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Faust, the best-selling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of exquisite lyric poetry (set to music by Schubert and Mozart), and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, poems, and treatises, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also excelled as an administrator in thecabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Considered by Nietzsche to have been 'not just a good and great man, but an entire culture', Goethe was as vital a part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German social and political life, as he was its cultural nucleus. However, as this perceptive biography shows, the originality ofhis art lay in his complex distance from his times.

Download or read book The Romantic Conception of Life written by Robert J. Richards and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.

Download or read book Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written by Jeremy Adler and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Offering fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all Goethe’s major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe’s greatest work, Faust, Jeremy Adler also provides many original readings of Goethe’s poetry, beginning with the poems written in his early youth. Alongside Goethe’s work, Adler analyzes the incidents of his life, including his love affairs and his meetings with the luminaries of his age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Uniquely, Adler also shows how Goethe’s encyclopedic interest in literature, science, philosophy, law, and many other fields became important for a wide range of later scientists and thinkers. Among the figures he influenced were Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns—a maker of modernity.

Download or read book Goethe on Art written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: