Goethe's naturalistic anthropology
Subtitle: man and other plants
By: Matthew Bell.
Series: Oxford modern languages and literature monographs
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Oxford [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
Subjects: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832 -- Knowledge -- Anthropology.; Anthropology in literature.; Literature and 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.

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 Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism.

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 Wahlverwandtschaften.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [326]-342) and index.
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Oxford, 1991.