Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology - Man and Other Plants (Hardcover, New)

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 Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment 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 Wahlverwandtschaften.

General

Imprint:	Clarendon Press
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs
Release date:	August 1994
First published:	June 1997
Authors:	Matthew Bell (Lecturer in German)
Dimensions:	223 x 143 x 27mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	356
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-19-815894-3
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history Promotions
LSN:	0-19-815894-7
Barcode:	9780198158943

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