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

Boyle, Nicholas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0198158696 ISBN 13: 9780198158691

Casa editrice: Clarendon Press, 2000

Riassunto

In this, the second volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution, which turned his life upside down, and of the German philosophical revolution 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. Goethe was a poet of supreme intelligence and sensitivity living through political and intellectual changes which have shaped the modern world. The transition into modernity is the theme of this volume: Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars; the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which he absorbed and adapted and which for ten years made Jena the intellectual capital of Europe; the political upheaval initiated by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in which Goethe had grown up, and with it the cultural role he had envisaged for Jena and Weimar. Boyle vividly narrates both the large-scale events and the personal dramas of this exciting time, to give lucid accounts of important thinkers whom English readers have hitherto found inaccessible, and to analyse in new ways Goethe's works of the period, notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Readers who enjoyed the first volume of Nicholas Boyle's biography will not be disappointed by the second. Here too, one finds a wealth of fascinating detail represented with a raconteur's mastery of vivid evocation and dramatic, telling phraseology (Modern Language Review)

Boyle provides a marvellously succinct account of the events ... his masterly exposition of the main points of Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, and the young Hegel's thought is enormously helpful in placing Goethe in the intellectual atmosphere of his 'middle age'. Boyle's readings of Goethe's own writing are as lively and provocative in this second volume as in the first (Modern Language Review)

Wonderful ... an achievement of scholarship and imaginative reconstruction ... I emerged from this book as you do from a nostalgic dream, feeling I had been part, at least for a while, of a nobler time (Doris Lessing, Times Literary Supplement)

A quite extraordinary work of scholarship and understanding ... moving and always illuminating (A. S. Byatt, Times Literary Supplement)

The sales of Boyle's work show that the bookbuying public is prepared to spend both cash and time on writings of real intellectual quality. (Michael Beddow, Times Literary Supplement)

Because Boyle makes disalarmingly little fuss about his own originality, general readers may not realize just how much of this volume takes them to the leading edge of current Goethe scholarship (Michael Beddow, Times Literary Supplement)

It is a tribute to this extraordinary work of scholarship that non-specialist readers like myself can eagerly look forward to a third volume (Elaine Feinstein, Daily Telegraph)

In Nicholas Boyle, Goethe has found the biographer he deserves, one who has the wide-ranging intellect, penetrating curiosity and sheer energy to follow the diverse career of this elusive polymathic genius. There is no question that this biography, rich and dense, detailed and wide-ranging, is set to become the standard biography in English of a writer who is characterised by those same epithets. (Rosemary Ashton, Sunday Telegraph)

This is a heroic endeavour ... Professor Boyle's magnificent work is the stuff of a lifetime ... Professor Boyle takes us thrillingly to the heart of a shift in human sensibility ... throughout this work one is aware of a mind at home in the world, effortlessly making past and present one. His wit has a pleasingly manzanilla tang ... The success of Professor Boyle's work is that he not only persuades us of Goethe's enduring eminence, born of continual self-questioning, but conveys more of his Germany than one can convey here (Christopher Hawtree, Independent on Sunday)

In Boyle, Goethe has found a biographer of omnivorous curiosity, prodigious energy and capacious intellect, yet rigorous enough to resist the temptation to harness his subject to his own highly original political, philosophical and theological ideas ... a work of daunting magnitude ... monumental, yes, but also masterly ... At a time when biographers are inclined to omit serious discussion of ideas, even from biographies of those for whom the intellectual life was all, Boyle's Goethe will stand as a model to be imitated and, I hope, read for many years to come (Daniel Johnson, Literary Review)

L'autore:

Nicholas Boyle is Reader in German Literary and Intellectual History, and Head of the Department of German, at Cambridge University. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Clarendon Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0198158696
• ISBN 13: 9780198158691
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 964