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Literary Criticism German

Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity

by (author) Deirdre Vincent

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1992
Category
German, Germany, 19th Century
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487585822
    Publish Date
    Dec 1992
    List Price
    $41.95

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Description

Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther has received a great deal of attention from the scholarly community over the years. But until now it has never been thoroughly explored or evaluated. Deidre Vincent examines the two versions of Werther in the context of Geothe’s personal life in the intervening years.

 

Goethe wrote and published the original version of this novel to great acclaim throughout Europe in 1774, drawing on the experience of a traumatic love affair he had had in Wetzlar in 1772. When the revised work was published some thirteen years later, the public saw the second version as little more than a reissuing of the original, and scholars over the past two centuries have persisted in this view. Vincent analyses Goethe’s mode of writing and the role that literary creativity played for him during the first ten years or so in Weimar. She reveals how greatly the second version differs from the first, and challenges conventional explanations for the changes.

 

Vincent sheds new light on Werther and on some of Goether’s other important works written between 1776 and 1789.

About the author

DEIRDRE VINCENT is a member of the Department of German, University of Toronto. She is the author of The Eternity of Being: On the Experience of Time in Goethe’s ‘Faust’.

Deirdre Vincent's profile page