Goethe biography boyle

  • The first forty years of Goethe's creative life, rendered by Boyle in captivating detail, saw the early conception of Faust, and Goethe's rise to literary fame.
  • The Poet and the Age is the first full-length, original English-language biography of Goethe in sixty years.
  • The first volume of Nicholas Boyle's Goethe eight years ago helped to put Goethe back on the map in the English-speaking world, and the second.

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    Goethe: The Poet and the Age (GOETHE, THE POET OF THE AGE) - Hardcover

    Synopsis

    In 1880 Nietzche observed that Goethe had been "not just a good and great man, but an entire culture." The author of Faust, of exquisite lyric poetry, and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, and poetry as well as treatises on botany and color theory, Goethe also excelled as an administrator in the cabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Now, Nicholas Boyle has written the definitive biography of this extraordinary figure--indeed, The Poet and the Age is the first full-length, original English-language biography of Goethe in sixty years.
    In this elegant and enjoyable first volume--the first of two projected books--Boyle captures the passions and poetry of the young Goethe, leading us up to the moment when the French Revolution shook the foundations of all of Europe. Boyle contends that, although Goethe was certainly as much a part of German social and political life as he was its

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    Goethe: The Poet and the Age

    Goethe: The Poet and the Ageis a sweeping two-volume biographyof the German writer and statesman. Written by scholar Nicholas Boyle, the first volume, The Poetry of Desire, was published in 1991, and the second, Revolution and Renunciation, came along in 2000; Oxford University Press published both volumes. Boyle combines an academic approach with accessible language, historical context, and vivid characterizations, creating an all-encompassing portrait of the legendary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a literary and political superman who was both of his time and distinctly separate from it.

    The first volume opens with an examination of the world into which Goethe emerged, eighteenth-century Germany. Boyle details the political, cultural, and literary life of the region. Born on August 28, 1749, Goethe grows up in Frankfurt. His parents have several children, but only Johann and his sister, Cornelia, survive beyond infancy.

    From an early age, private
  • goethe biography boyle

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    We barely glimpse Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in this magisterial tome's first 75 pages, which are devoted to the revolutions wrought bygd the French people in politics and Immanuel Kant in philosophy. They must be understood, argues British scholar Nicholas Boyle in the second volume of a projected trilogy, because their impact transformed Goethe's life and art: "What had been a cultural quest, winding through the complex social certainties of the German ancien regime, became an interrogation of all levels of existence in an epoch of world-wide revolution and nascent Romanticism." Examining the period simplistically known as "Weimar classicism" (1790-1803), Boyle offers penetrating analyses of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Faust: Part I, and The Natural Daughter, the works through which Goethe developed his mature theme of renunciation, "the silence that acknowledges the absence from reality of the Ideal." But the author also limns with acuity Goethe's relations with ot