Delphi Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Illustrated)
Requirements: MOBI Readers, 9.5 MB
Overview: Goethe is the only German literary figure whose range and international standing equal those of Germany’s supreme philosophers (who have often drawn on his works and ideas) and composers (who have often set his works to music). In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries, he has had so dominant a position that, since the end of the 18th century, his writings have been described as “classical.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement, broadly understood. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His Faust, though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited, is also Europe’s greatest long poem since John Milton’s Paradise Lost, if not since Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Goethe was a contemporary of thinkers—Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt—who carried out an intellectual revolution that is at the basis of most modern thinking about religion, art, society, and thought itself. He knew most of these people well, furthered the careers of several of them, promoted many of their ideas, and expressed his reaction to them in his literary works. The age they helped to make was an age dominated by the idea of freedom, of individual self-determination, whether in the intellectual and moral sphere or in practical politics—the age both of German Idealism and of the American and French revolutions. If there is a single theme running through Goethe’s huge and varied literary output, it is his reflection on subjectivity—his showing how in ever-changing ways we make our own selves, the world we inhabit, and the meaning of our lives. Yet he also shows how, without leaving that self-made world, we collide all the time with the reality of things. Ultimately, Goethe believes, this reality is not alien or hostile to us, because, whatever it is, we—and our capacity for experience—ultimately derive from it too. Goethe therefore calls it Nature, that out of which we are born.
Because of his unusually independent personal circumstances, Goethe was able to live through the consequences of the intellectual revolution as a free man, with no traditional religious or social attachments. He led a long and productive life in which his energy and originality never slackened. He was, those who met him agreed, an intensely and uncannily fascinating man, and part of the secret of his fascination was that he was always changing: he was called a chameleon or a Proteus or simply inconsistent. In particular, his writings show a remarkable, but usually discreetly phrased, awareness of the permanently shifting character of human sexuality. His public never knew what he was going to do or write next: none of his works is like any of the others—he never substantially repeated himself. Yet he remained faithful to his duke, to his wife, to Weimar (his adopted homeland), to his rejection of Christianity, and to his literary vocation. The attractive power of his writing, which has not diminished with time, perhaps lies in the extraordinary strength of personality that it radiates, the certainty it conveys of an inexplicit unity underlying all its diversity, and the promise it seems to offer of a disclosure of the secret nature of personality itself.
Genre: Drama; Poetry; 18th-Century German Poetry; 19th-Century German Poetry; German Romanticism
This eBook presents the most comprehensive collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works available, with beautiful illustrations, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material.
CONTENTS:
The Novels
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER
WILHELM MEISTER’S APPRENTICESHIP
ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
WILHELM MEISTER’S JOURNEYMAN YEARS
The Short Stories
A TALE
THE GOOD WOMEN
The Plays
THE WAYWARD LOVER
THE FELLOW CULPRITS
GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN
CLAVIGO
EGMONT
THE BROTHER AND SISTER
STELLA
IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS
TORQUATO TASSO
FAUST: PART ONE
THE NATURAL DAUGHTER
FAUST: PART TWO
The Poetry
THE POEMS OF GOETHE
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Non-Fiction
THEORY OF COLOURS
MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS
The Criticism
GOETHE – THE WRITER by Ralph Waldo Emerson
GOETHE by C. E. Vaughan
GOETHE by John Cowper Powys
GOETHE’S FAUST by George Santayana
SHAKESPEARE AND GOETHE by David Masson
GOETHE’S THEORY OF COLORS by John Tyndall
EXTRACTS OF CORRESPONDENCE by Sir Walter Scott
The Autobiography
TRUTH AND FICTION RELATING TO MY LIFE
The Biography
THE LIFE OF GOETHE by Calvin Thomas
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