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Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology

Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology

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Description
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 Englightment - to the emergence of his own theory of `empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehriahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Engligtenment 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 Wahllverwandtschaften.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
360
Release Date:
1994-10-20
Publication Date:
1997-06-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0198158947
ISBN13:
9780198158943
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Weight:
639 g
Height:
145 cm
Width:
222 cm
Thickness:
25 cm
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