Interpreting Goethe's "Faust" today
By: edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine ; in collaboration with Paul Hernadi and Cyrus Hamlin.
Contributors: Brown, Jane K., 1943-; Lee, Meredith, 1945-; Saine, Thomas P.
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Columbia, SC
Language: eng
Number of pages: 277
Subjects: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832.; Faust, d. ca. 1540 -- In literature.
Description: This collection of new essays on Goethe's masterpiece offers samples of the diverse ways in which Faust is being read by leading scholars and teachers on both sides of the Atlantic. Faust has always been intimately tied to Germany's own view of itself; as a new Germany is forged the current understanding of its greatest work of literature will help to shape the identity of the new nation.

Like Faust itself, the volume offers neither closed structure nor final conclusions, but illustrates and elaborates the richness of the work.

Some of the essays present us with a dramatically new Faust seen in terms of history, gender, the Gothic novel, while others present Faust in the more familiar contexts of irony, technology, and modernism. The three main characters - Faust, the devil, and Margareta - provide the basic categories of organization. There is an additional section on art and representation, which relates the play to the newest developments in critical theory.

The book closes with a section on the recent reception of the text in translation and in actual theatrical performance in order to give readers a full view of the status and significance of Goethe's Faust today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. xv) and index.
"Simultaneously published as: Goethe yearbook, Special issue no. 1. Publications of the Goethe Society of North America."