Book Description

WEIMAR CLASSICISM: This descriptive term, designating a unique and verybrief epoch of literary and cultural achievement in Germany, is familiar to everystudent of German literature and culture. It was not always so. Only toward theend of the nineteenth century was the term introduced retrospectively in referenceto the few years at the end of the preceding century, which marked the high pointof the career of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who resided in the otherwise smalland provincial Duchy of Weimar and whose achievement as man of lettersestablished what ultimately came to be called OCyClassicism.OCO These were also theyears of the close friendship of Goethe with the dramatist and Kantian theoristFriedrich Schiller, documented by the nearly daily exchange of letters between thetwo OCo Schiller lived at the time in nearby Jena OCo which Goethe edited andpublished more than twenty years after SchillerOCOs death. The essays assembled inthe present volume would all acknowledge the legitimacy of this designation, even though they are addressed to various peripheral aspects of WeimarClassicism, related to but distinct from the work of its two central authors (theessay by T. J. Reed is the exception)."