Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume 2: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803

Goethe: The Poet and the Age #2

by Nicholas Boyle

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 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.

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

988 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2000

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

[Rosa Rose]

Second part of the probably best Goethe-biography ever written. Waiting impaciently for the third part.