{"product_id":"bell-matthew-goethe-s-naturalistic-anthropology-9780198158943","title":"Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology","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.\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n 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.\n\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\n 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.","brand":"OUP Oxford","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53768277229910,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/bell-matthew-goethe-s-naturalistic-anthropology-9780198158943","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}