Metamimesis : imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and early German romanticism / Mattias Pirholt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pirholt, Mattias, 1975-

Series:

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered)

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.

Mimesis in literature.

Romanticism--Germany.

Romanticism.

Germany.

Physical Description:

x, 220 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, 2012.

Summary:

Mimesis, or the imitation of nature, is one of the most important concepts in eighteenth-century German literary aesthetics. As the century progressed, classical mimeticism came in increasingly under attack, though it also held its position in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Moritz. Much recent scholarship construes Early German Romanticism's refutation of mimeticism as its single distinguishing trait: the Romantics' conception of art as the very negation of the ideal of imitation. In this view, the Romantics saw art as production (poiesis): imaginative, musical, transcendent. Mattias Pirholt's book not only problematizes this view of Romanticism, but also shows that reflections on mimesis are foundational for the German Romantic novel, as is Goethe's great pre-Romantic novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Among the novels examined are Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, shown to be transgressive in its use of the aesthetics of imitation; Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, interpreted as an attempt to construct the novel as a self-imitating world; and Clemens Brentano's Godwi, seen to signal the end of Early Romanticism, both fulfilling and ironically deconstructing the self-reflective mimeticism of the novels that came before it. Book jacket.

Contents:

Romanticism, mimesis, and the novel

Double-entry imagery: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

Imitation and indolence: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde

Imitation and simulation: Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Beyond romantic representation: Clemens Brentano's Godwi

Conclusions: mimesis and the critical politics of Romanticism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781571135346

1571135340

OCLC:

777665038