Goethe: The Poet and the Age - Softcover

Boyle, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199257515 ISBN 13: 9780199257515

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

When Volume I of Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe appeared, it received an avalanche of praise on both sides of the Atlantic. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called it "the best biography of Goethe in English." Doris Lessing, in The Independent, called it "biography at its best." And The New York Times Book Review hailed it as "a remarkable achievement," adding "there is nothing comparable to this study in any language."
Now comes the second volume of this definitive portrait, published on the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth. Here Nicholas Boyle chronicles the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution--which turned Goethe's life upside down--and of the philosophical revolution in Germany 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. Boyle paints vivid portraits of Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars, of the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which for ten years made Jena the intellectual capital of Europe, and of the upheavals sparked by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire.
Boyle captures both the large-scale events that swept Europe and the personal dramas of this exciting time. And he offers brilliant new analyses of Goethe's works of the period, most notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust. Indeed, this volume is a major work of historical and literary scholarship, and an important biography of one of the giants of Western culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, and Head of the Department of German, at Cambridge University. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Review:

"The aftermath of the political and philosophical revolutions in France and Königsberg are the focus of this volume....Boyle sets the stage for Goethe by telling us who thought what, when, and why during this fourteen-year span commonly known as Goethe's 'classical period'....The unique contribution of this biography lies in the vast learning and narrative skill with which Boyle traces the process of Goethe's peculiar amalgamation of truth and fiction, his merging of the personal and historical with the symbolic and the universal. Make it four volumes, Boyle deserves it."--Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Boyle brings to his task inexhaustible energy, an eye for telling detail, and great lucidity of judgement."--New York Review of Books

"This biography is well written and eminently readable. The reader is soon transported into the life and times of the period covered. It is very difficult to put the book down once one has started reading and beginning to feel that one is a fly on the wall watching history develop."--Dr. F.T. Hamblin, British-German Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0199257515
• ISBN 13: 9780199257515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 988