Byron, Shelley and Goethe's Faust


Book Description

The first part of Goethe's dramatic poem Faust (1808), one of the great works of German literature, grabbed the attention of Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1810s, engaging them in a shared fascination that was to exert an important influence over their writings. In this comparative study, Ben Hewitt explores the links between Faust and Byron's and Shelley's works, connecting Goethe and the two English Romantic poets in terms of their differing, intricately related experiments with epic. In so doing, Hewitt enters the three writers into a literary and philosophical dialogue concerning 'epic' and 'tragic' perspectives on human knowledge and potential - perspectives crucial to the very structure and significance of Goethe's masterpiece - and illuminates hitherto unacknowledged affinities between these key figures in Romantic literature, and between British and German Romanticisms.




Goethe and the English-speaking World


Book Description

New studies of both Goethe's relationship to the English-speaking world and its perception of Goethe and his works.Goethe's relations with the English-speaking world have been the subject of scholarly investigation ever since his lifetime. This volume brings together eighteen articles that provide new points of view, a broad range of approaches, and new and original findings on this relationship. These range from the discussion of applications of recent critical approaches such as chaos theory and Edward Said's Orientalism to Goethean texts, through other more empirical contributions that bring to light new material, some of it deriving from archives in Weimar relating to Goethe's contact with English culture. Other essays involve the reassessment of questions of influence, from both sides: inthe case of Cooper and Goethe some standard assumptions are revised, while in the case of Goethe and Edith Wharton and Goethe and George Eliot, new comparative ground is broken. Close readings of portions of well-known texts suchas Faust and Wilhelm Meister challenge standard assumptions. The analysis of selected recent translations of Goethe's poetry raises perennial questions of cultural transfer, while the survey of the role played by some of Goethe's texts in one corner of the English-speaking world, Dublin, is long overdue. Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, Head of the Department of German in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. John Guthrie is College Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at New Hall, Cambridge.exts suchas Faust and Wilhelm Meister challenge standard assumptions. The analysis of selected recent translations of Goethe's poetry raises perennial questions of cultural transfer, while the survey of the role played by some of Goethe's texts in one corner of the English-speaking world, Dublin, is long overdue. Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, Head of the Department of German in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. John Guthrie is College Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at New Hall, Cambridge.exts suchas Faust and Wilhelm Meister challenge standard assumptions. The analysis of selected recent translations of Goethe's poetry raises perennial questions of cultural transfer, while the survey of the role played by some of Goethe's texts in one corner of the English-speaking world, Dublin, is long overdue. Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, Head of the Department of German in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. John Guthrie is College Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at New Hall, Cambridge.exts suchas Faust and Wilhelm Meister challenge standard assumptions. The analysis of selected recent translations of Goethe's poetry raises perennial questions of cultural transfer, while the survey of the role played by some of Goethe's texts in one corner of the English-speaking world, Dublin, is long overdue. Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, Head of the Department of German in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. John Guthrie is College Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at New Hall, Cambridge.versity of Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College. John Guthrie is College Lecturer in German and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at New Hall, Cambridge.










The British Critic


Book Description













Literature and the Cult of Personality


Book Description

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe’s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.




Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic


Book Description

"In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression."--Provided by publisher.