Author : Nancy Birch Wagner
Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (2 download)
Book Synopsis Goethe as Cultural Icon by : Nancy Birch Wagner
Download or read book Goethe as Cultural Icon written by Nancy Birch Wagner and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1994 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacy of Goethe in the nineteenth century is familiar and fertile territory to literary scholars. In contrast with typical influence studies, which compare Goethe with his epigonal successors, this work breaks new ground in previously unappreciated areas and in several subtle forms. Focusing on two prominent and distinctly different nineteenth-century writers, the Austrian Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) and the Prussian-born Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), the book discovers the importance of Goethe's views on the visual arts to the realistic theorizing of both writers by deftly encompassing several seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters, as well as the nineteenth-century sculptor of the Brandenburg Gate in this sphere of aesthetic influence. Of particular interest to the study of Goethe's resonance are the role of George Henry Lewes's 1855 biography of Goethe and the reverberation of Goethe's concept of «Gegenständlichkeit», which are studied within the context of their writings and the era in general.