Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe
A Contribution to the History of Ideas
Paul E. Kerry
Throughout his oeuvre Goethe invokes the writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment: Voltaire and Goldsmith, Sterne and Bayle, Beccaria and Franklin. And he does not merely reference them: their ideas make up the salt of his most acclaimed works. Like Hume before him, Goethe takes up the topic of suicide, but in a best-selling novel, Werther; the beating heart of Faust I is the fate of a woman who commits infanticide, a burning social issue of his age; in an article for a popular journal Goethe takes up the cause of Kant and Penn, who wrote treatises on how to establish peace in Europe. In another essay Goethe calls for reconciliation between Germans who had fought against each other in those same Wars, as well as for worldwide understanding between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Heathens. Professor Kerry shows that Goethe is a child of the Enlightenment and an innovator of its legacy. To do so he discusses a chronological swath of Goethe's works, both popular and neglected, and shows how each of them engages Enlightenment concerns.
PAUL KERRY is professor of history at Brigham Young University.
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DETAILS
256 pages
Size: 9 x 6 in
13 digit ISBN: 9781571132215
Binding: Hardback
First published: 01/Aug/2001
Last printed: 15/Sep/2001
Price: 75.00 USD / 40.00 GBP
Imprint: Camden House
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Subject: German Literature
BIC class: AVH
STATUS: Available
Details updated on 18/11/2008
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Contents
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Introduction
| 1 | |
The Emergence of Enlightenment Concerns
| 2 | |
Adoption, Adaptation, and Assimilation in Iphigenie auf Tauris
| 3 | |
An Enlightenment Coign of Vantage: The Intersection of History, Literature, and Belief in Egmont
| 4 | |
Healing the Wounds of War: The Sankt-Rochus-Fest zu bingen
| 5 | |
The Morgenblatt Essay on Die Geheimnisse
| 6 | |
Goethe's Weltfest
| 7 | |
The Foreign and the Familiar in the West-östlicher Divan
| 8 | |
Besserem Verständniss
| 9 | |
Religious Freedom in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
| 10 | |
Excursus: "In this sense ... we do not tolerate Jews among us"
| 11 | |
Eigenheiten and Weltverkehn
| 12 | |
Conclusion
| 13 | |
Works Consulted
| 14 | |
Index
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Reviews
An ambitious attempt to codify the use of Enlightenment philosophy in the writing of Goethe. BOOK NEWS
Kerry's analyses demonstrate a profound mastery of the sources, of both Goethe's works and the secondary literature, with a pronounced preference for "little-known pieces". MONATSHEFTE (trans. from German)
Clear, informative, and interesting. It is general enough to serve a less specialized readership, but it also brings to light aspects of Goethe's work that might otherwise be ignored. SEMINAR
In choosing the texts that he does, and providing a very clever glimpse of the background within which those texts were generated, Kerry's book is worth the read, not just for Goethe enthusiasts, or Enlightenment scholars, but also for those seriously considering tolerance in our own age. JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY
In his forthright and clearly-written book, Kerry proves that he is a determined proponent of the argument that the great German writer felt a significant obligation to the Enlightenment, and that "the Enlightenment engages Goethe for most of his life.." DAS ACHTZEHNTE JAHRHUNDERT
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