Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Conventions, Editions, and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- What is Classicism?
- Antiquity and Weimar Classicism
- The Correspondents' Noncorrespondence: Goethe, Schiller and the Briefwechsel
- Johann Gottfried Herder: The Weimar Classic Back of the (City)Church
- Drama and Theatrical Practice in Weimar Classicism
- German Classical Poetry
- The Novel in Weimar Classicism: Symbolic Form and Symbolic Pregnance
- German Women Writers and Classicism
- Weimar Classicism as Visual Culture
- The Irrelevance of Aesthetics and the De-Theorizing of the Self in “Classical” Weimar
- Goethe's “Classical” Science
- The Political Context of Weimar Classicism
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
The Novel in Weimar Classicism: Symbolic Form and Symbolic Pregnance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Conventions, Editions, and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- What is Classicism?
- Antiquity and Weimar Classicism
- The Correspondents' Noncorrespondence: Goethe, Schiller and the Briefwechsel
- Johann Gottfried Herder: The Weimar Classic Back of the (City)Church
- Drama and Theatrical Practice in Weimar Classicism
- German Classical Poetry
- The Novel in Weimar Classicism: Symbolic Form and Symbolic Pregnance
- German Women Writers and Classicism
- Weimar Classicism as Visual Culture
- The Irrelevance of Aesthetics and the De-Theorizing of the Self in “Classical” Weimar
- Goethe's “Classical” Science
- The Political Context of Weimar Classicism
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Awareness of stylistic technique is necessary to aesthetic appreciation; but formal analysis is not sufficient for criticism. In the case of the novel, which, as Henry James (1843–1916) insisted, is an “ado about something,” the “formalistic fallacy” is peculiarly inappropriate. Unless we appreciate the status of the material deployed — unless we have some idea of what is being related to what — we are in no position to grasp the meaning of the resultant structure. It is, therefore, part of the scholarly business of literary history to provide an adequate sense of the significance of a writer's subject matter, by placing it in historical perspective. In the flood of novels published in German in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, joining the ranks of translations of English, French, and Spanish novels, this subject matter is astonishingly homogeneous. Whether we consider the epistolary novel, modeled on the work of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the Bildungsroman, or the novel of entertainment, of adventure, of travel, we are presented with the same set of themes, with only marginal variations. Otherwise helpful periodizations of literary history tend to obscure the fact that works as superficially different as Christoph Martin Wieland's Die Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of Agathon, 1766) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) made their appearance within only a decade of each other.
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- Information
- The Literature of Weimar Classicism , pp. 211 - 236Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005