The Complete Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Wilhelm Meister, Torquato Tasso, The Sorrows Of Young Werther and More

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (Translator)

This collection gathers together the works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a single, convenient, high quality, and extremely low priced Kindle volume!

The Life of Goethe
Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life (Autobiography)

The Complete Novels:

Elective Affinities
The Recreations Of The German Emigrants: A Fairy Tale
The Sorrows Of Young Werther
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
Wilhelm Weister’s Travels. A Romance.

The Complete Plays:

Clavigo
Egmont
Faust: A Tragedy
Götz Von Berlichingen With The Iron Hand. A Drama.
Iphigenia In Tauris: A Drama
Stella. A Tragedy.
The Brother And Sister
The Good Women.
The Natural Daughter: A Tragedy
Torquato Tasso
The Wayward Lover
The Fellow Culprits

The Complete Children’s Books:

Reynard the Fox.
Hermann and Dorothea

The Complete Poetry in Collections:

Art
Epigrams.
Parables
Poems
Familiar Songs
Selected Poems.
Sonnets.
Trilogy of Passion.

The Complete Non-Fiction:

Theory of Colours
Maxims and Reflections

Genres: Poetry

4996 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2012

About the author

A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust , published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.

George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther .

With this key figure of German literature, the movement of Weimar classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries coincided with Enlightenment, sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours , he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. He also long served as the privy councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar.

Goethe took great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, and Arabia and originated the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"). Despite his major, virtually immeasurable influence on German philosophy especially on the generation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, he expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense.

Influence spread across Europe, and for the next century, his works inspired much music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Many persons consider Goethe the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in western culture as well. Early in his career, however, he wondered about painting, perhaps his true vocation; late in his life, he expressed the expectation that people ultimately would remember his work in optics.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I guess I've nearly spent three years reading this, though not continuously and certainly not front to back. I picked it up for $0.99 on Kindle as a quick way to get at a translation of Faust, but I did want to get more deeply acquainted with his other plays, his novels, and his poetry. It certainly helped with that, and while I can't really speak to the quality of the translation, I found all of this clear and engaging.

So why three stars? Mainly, I don't think it actually is complete. Most seriously, it's missing his "Metamorphosis of Plants." I don't actually remember coming across "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (searching on "sorcerer" or "apprentice" didn't come up with anything), but this is a little less serious. There are also a few oddities. The long poem "Hermann and Dorothea" appears twice, once as a Children's Book, and once in the Poetry section. Weirdly, the follow-up to "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship" is titled "Wilhelm Weister's Travels," and it did take me a few chapters to realize that the protagonist of the second really was the titular character of the first. And putting Reynard the Fox in the Children's Book section is an interesting choice, given Reynard's behavior.