WHEN SHE HEARD the plans for this book, my 91-year-old mother remarked that “it doesn't sound like much of a page-turner.” She's right, of course. Few people will take Goethe's Werther and the Critics along to the beach. Students and scholars, on the other hand, might find it a useful tool. As part of the Camden House series Literary Criticism in Perspective, it seeks to trace the critical reception of Goethe's first novel. “One of the primary purposes of the series,” the editors state, “is to illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and historic currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective and normative.” Goethe's Werther, which has inspired well over two centuries' worth of criticism, turns out to be a particularly good subject for just such an investigation. The book's age, textual richness, and sustained popularity, combined with its author's canonical, even mythical status, have invited a broad range of interpretations by critics of all stripes.

When it appeared in 1774, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, traditionally translated as The Sorrows of Young Werther, created a possibly unique sensation in the history of publishing. “Werther-Fever,” a phenomenon that included not just enthusiasm for the novel, but also a desire to emulate its hero, spread throughout Europe and then to America. There was even a translation into Chinese, a first for a German book. So influential was Werther that nineteenth-century social critics later designated any romantic overindulgence as “Werther-sickness” or “Wertherism,” and twentieth-century psychologists adopted the term “Werther effect” to describe imitative suicides.