Goethe: The Poet and the Age

Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790–1803
Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-0-19-899658-3
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 896 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

In this, the second volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution, which turned his life upside down, and of the German philosophical revolution which ushered in the periods of Idealism and Romanticism. It was also a period dominated by two intense personal relationships: with Schiller, Weimar's other great poet, philosopher, and dramatist, and with Christiana Vulpius, the mother of his son. Goethe was a poet of supreme intelligence and sensitivity living through political and intellectual changes which have shaped the modern world. The transition into modernity is the theme of this volume: Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars; the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which he absorbed and adapted and which for ten years made Jena the intellectual capital of Europe; the political upheaval initiated by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in which Goethe had grown up, and with it the cultural role he had envisaged for Jena and Weimar.

Boyle vividly narrates both the large-scale events and the personal drama of this exciting time, to give lucid accounts of important thinkers whom English readers have hitherto found inaccessible, and to analyse in new ways Goethe's works of the period, notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust

Autoren/Hrsg.

Boyle, Nicholas

Über Autor(innen)

Nicholas Boyle studied French and German at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he has been a fellow since 1968. After research with J. P. Stern on the aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg, he became a lecturer in the university's Department of German, Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, and Schröder Professor of German in 2006, retiring in 2013. In addition to his work on Goethe and German literature and philosophy his books cover topics in theology and cultural and political criticism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the council in Frankfurt which manages Goethe's birthplace.