Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume 1: The Poetry of Desire, 1749-1790

Goethe: The Poet and the Age #1

by Nicholas Boyle

The author of Faust, the best-selling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of exquisite lyric poetry (set to music by Schubert and Mozart), and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, poems, and treatises, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

Considered by Nietzsche to have been `not just a good and great man, but an entire culture', Goethe was as vital a part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German social and political life, as he was its cultural nucleus. However, as this perceptive biography shows, the originality of his art lay in his complex distance from his times.

Genres: Biography, History, Germany, Nonfiction, Romanticism, Biography Memoir

844 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Nicholas Boyle studied French and German at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he has been a fellow since 1968. After research with J. P. Stern on the aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg, he became a lecturer in the university's Department of German, Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, and Schröder Professor of German in 2006, retiring in 2013. In addition to his work on Goethe and German literature and philosophy his books cover topics in theology and cultural and political criticism. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the council in Frankfurt which manages Goethe's birthplace.

Reviews

[Stewart Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book, very detailed. I learned more about Goethe than I ever thought possible. There was not enough written about the time, but rather it focused on his life and immediate circles.

[Rosa Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best Goethe-biography ever written.

[John]

philosophy,biography,nonfiction,enlightenment

[Jack Coleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic Biography which is hard to read but interesting insites into the age