Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany's most celebrated, prolific
and versatile writer. He established a major European reputation
and profoundly influenced his contemporaries and literary
successors, not least among them the British Romantic writers
Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. Goethe's life spanned a long period of
profound change in German and European history. This book, by the
author of a critically acclaimed study of Goethe's "Faust," sets
Goethe's creative work in the context of his biography and of the
literary and political movements of his time. It contains chapters
on his life, his poetry, drama, prose and verse narratives, and on
his scientific work. It is a study not only of his major works, but
also of his less well known literary output: epigrams, aphorisms,
satires, libretti, masquerades, dramatic and narrative
fragments.
John R. Williams gives an account of Goethe's wide range of
public activities as a minister of the Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar, his
relations with the leading figures of the day, his influence on
contemporary culture, and his personal and literary reactions to
historical events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, from the "ancien regime" to the French Revolution, from
the Napoleonic invasion of Germany to the defeat of Napoleon, from
the Congress of Vienna to the July Revolution of 1830, from the
declining years of the Holy Roman Empire to the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution in Germany. Goethe's life and work are
introduced and explained to the student of literature and to the
interested general reader. Williams reveals his subject in all the
great variety of his character, his occasionally scurrilous humour
and exuberance, his characteristic ironic ambivalence, and his
sometimes flawed wisdom and humanity.
Catering for the specialist in German literature and for the
non-German reader, "The Life of Goethe" offers English translations
of all quotations given in the text. An extensive bibliography
details a wide selection of Goethe's works in English
translation.
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