Literature and the cult of personality : essays on Goethe and his influence / Gregory Maertz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maertz, Gregory, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832--Influence.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.

English literature--German influences.

English literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Stuttgart, Germany : Ibidem-Verlag, 2017.

Summary:

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe?s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. 00In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.

Contents:

Literature and the cult of personality: on Goethe's influence in Britain

Goethe and the generation of 1789 : cultural mediation and literary enfranchisement

Goethe, the reception of Kant, and the Romantic culture war in Britain

The accidental intermediary : Henry Crabb Robinson and the translation of Goethe's poetry

Goethe and the Romantic idealization of the artist

Resistance and concealment : Goethe and the Canonical British Romantic poets

Thomas Carlyle and the Imitatio Goethe

Cultural identity and the transmission of Goethe in New England

The failure of Romanticism and the Triumph of Realism in Middlemarch: Goethe and the literary formation of George Eliot

De-mythologizing Goethe: George Saintsbury and the Assertion of British cultural autonomy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.