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Book The Essential Goethe

Download or read book The Essential Goethe written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 1051 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published by Wordsworth Editions 1999 and 2007. First published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

Book Goethe s Botanical Writings

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
  • Release : 2021-05-25
  • ISBN : 082488504X
  • Pages : 269 pages

Download or read book Goethe s Botanical Writings written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about the golden youth and the Olympian old age of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, poet; less has been written, however, about Goethe the scientist, who, pursuing independent research in many fields, opposed the professional men of his day with brilliant theories of his own. The educated world, familiar with Faust, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister, is not so generally aware of the scientific achievements of the man who had a genus of plants (Goethea) and a mineral (goethite) named for him who coined and first used the word morphology; who contributed to the understanding of the physiology of color; who rediscovered and described the intermaxillary bone in man, propounded the vertebral theory of the skull, formulated a concept in botanical morphology that persists to this day; who discovered the volcanic origin of a mountain; who established the first system of weather stations; who made the first systematic classification of minerals and was among the first to use the comparative method in biology; and who came unwittingly close to achieving the greatest concept in biology—some say the greatest concept in the thinking of man—the theory of organic evolution and the descent of man. Even in those few cases where subsequent research has proved Goethe’s theories to be wrong, his supporting accumulation of facts has proved extremely valuable to science. Goethe was born at the beginning of a great scientific era. But he was a creative thinker; his was not the analytic mind that emphasized fine differences but the synthetic mind that sensed the unity behind the differences. He was also an ardent lover of nature, possessed of unlimited curiosity. Consequently, as a contemporary observed, "Whatever Goeth looked upon in nature immediately acquired the character of a living experience for him." Most of the material translated in this volume is taken from notes and essays which Goethe published from 1817 to 1824 in journal form. Occupying a central position is the most famous and lasting of his scientific writings, the essay on the metamorphosis of plants—an essay which is today considered "one of the minor classics of botany." One of the most important episodes in Goethe's life was his flight to Italy, where he was delighted by the climate and the luxuriance of the plant life. A fan palm in particular attracted his attention because its leaves seemed to exhibit a complete series of transitions from the simple lance-shaped first leaves to the most complex fan type. "At my request," Goethe wrote in his diary, "the gardener cut off an entire sequence of modifications for me, and I burdened myself with several pasteboard containers in which to carry these treasures around." From this beginning Goethe started to evolve his theory of plant metamorphosis, and he returned to Weimar convinced that he had found the secret. The literary student will find much to interest him in this translation—the poet's own account of his grief and suffering at the hands of misunderstanding friends, and his victory over a threatening neurosis. Such essays as "The History of My Botanical Studies" and "The Fate of My Manuscript" throw much light on the crucial middle period of Goethe's life. During Goethe's lifetime and after, there was a tendency to ignore his scientific accomplishments in the face of his literary works. Many felt that they were almost a crime against his poetry. A few, however, contended that in science lay the center and focal point of Goethe's mental life. Goethe, himself, toward the end of his life wrote, "For more than a half century I have been known as a poet, in my own country and undoubtedly also abroad; or at any rate I have been permitted to pass for one. But the fact that I have busily occupied myself with Nature in all her general physical and organic phenomena, constantly and passionately pursuing seriously formulated studies—this is not so generally known; still less has it been accorded any attention." "Minds like Goethe's," Thomas Carlyle said, "are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should have correct impressions of them." This translation will enable those not familiar with the German language to gain a direct impression of Goethe's mind as expressed in his botanical writings.

Book Elective Affinities

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1872
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 342 pages

Download or read book Elective Affinities written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Selected Works of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Download or read book Selected Works of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2000-05-30 with total page 1256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains a brief biography of Goethe, a collection of some of his best-known works, and a sampling of his personal correspondence. Includes his four major works, together with a selection of his finest letters and poems. The Sorrows of Young Werther is a story of self-destructive love that made its author a celebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five. Its exploration of the conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance and desire, continues in his controversial novel probing the institution of marriage, Elective Affinities. The cosmic drama of Faust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poetic exploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in the author's old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the effect of Mediterranean culture on a young northerner. Translators include W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, David Constantine, Barker Fairley, and Elizabeth Mayer.

Book Goethe on Art

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 1980-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780520039964
  • Pages : 276 pages

Download or read book Goethe on Art written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Faust

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Bantam Classics
  • Release : 1988-07-01
  • ISBN : 0553213482
  • Pages : 466 pages

Download or read book Faust written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Bantam Classics. This book was released on 1988-07-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goethe’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest work in German literature, Faust has made the legendary German alchemist one of the central myths of the Western world. Here indeed is a monumental Faust, an audacious man boldly wagering with the devil, Mephistopheles, that no magic, sensuality, experience, or knowledge can lead him to a moment he would wish to last forever. Here, in Faust, Part I, the tremendous versatility of Goethe’s genius creates some of the most beautiful passages in literature. Here too we experience Goethe’s characteristic humor, the excitement and eroticism of the witches’ Walpurgis Night, and the moving emotion of Gretchen’s tragic fate. This authoritative edition, which offers Peter Salm’s wonderfully readable translation as well as the original German on facing pages, brings us Faust in a vital, rhythmic American idiom that carefully preserves the grandeur, integrity, and poetic immediacy of Goethe’s words.

Book Goethe  Life as a Work of Art

Download or read book Goethe Life as a Work of Art written by Rüdiger Safranski and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age. A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and—as Rüdiger Safranksi emphasizes—a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a “fresh and authentic” (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending “artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings” of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, “[Safranski’s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy” of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker). As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe’s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

Book West Eastern Divan

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Gingko Library
  • Release : 2019-10-15
  • ISBN : 1909942413
  • Pages : 452 pages

Download or read book West Eastern Divan written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic traditions, and was immediately inspired to create his own West-Eastern Divan as a lyrical conversation between the poetry and history of his native Germany and that of Persia. The resulting collection engages with the idea of the other and unearths lyrical connections between cultures. The West-Eastern Divan is one of the world’s great works of literature, an inspired masterpiece, and a poetic linking of European and Persian traditions. This new bilingual edition expertly presents the wit, intelligence, humor, and technical mastery of the poetry in Goethe’s Divan. In order to preserve the work’s original power, Eric Ormsby has created this translation in clear contemporary prose rather than in rhymed verse, which tends to obscure the works sharpness. This edition is also accompanied by explanatory notes of the verse in German and in English and a translation of Goethe’s own commentary, the “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” This edition not only bring this classic collection to English-language readers, but also, at a time of renewed Western unease about the other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.

Book Essays on Art and Literature

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 1994-07-25
  • ISBN : 9780691036571
  • Pages : 288 pages

Download or read book Essays on Art and Literature written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of an exhaustive series which provides English translations of a representative proportion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work, this volume contains such essays as "On Gothic Architecture", "On the Laocoon" and "Shakespeare: a Tribute."

Book Maxims and Reflections

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Penguin UK
  • Release : 2005-12-01
  • ISBN : 0141939184
  • Pages : 237 pages

Download or read book Maxims and Reflections written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills ... Goethe was probably the last true ‘Renaissance Man’. Although employed as a Privy Councillor at the Duke of Weimar’s court, where he helped oversee major mining, road-building and irrigation projects, he also painted, directed plays, carried out research in anatomy, botany and optics – and still found time to produce masterpieces in every literary genre. His fourteen hundred Maxims and Reflections reveal some of his deepest thought on art, ethics, literature and natural science, but also his immediate reactions to books, chance encounters or his administrative work. Although variable in quality, the vast majority have a freshness and immediacy which vividly conjure up Goethe the man. They make an ideal introduction to one of the greatest of European writers.

Book Goethe

Download or read book Goethe written by Peter Boerner and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was an exceptionally prolific and versatile writer. From his 'Storm and Stress' Gotz von Berlichingen to Faust, which evolved over a sixty-year period and in which he created the prototype of the Romantic hero.

Book From Goethe to Gundolf

Download or read book From Goethe to Gundolf written by Roger Paulin and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously researched, yet highly accessible. As a comprehensive examination of German literary history in the period 1700-1900, the collection not only includes accounts of the lives and work of Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, and Gundolf (amongst others), serving to nuance our understanding of these figures in history, but also considers diverse (and often underexplored) topics, from academic freedom to the rise of travel literature. The essays have been reformulated, corrected, and updated to add references to recent works. However, the core foundations of the originals remain, and just as when they were first published, the value of these essays – to researchers, students, and all those who are interested in German literary history – cannot be overstated.

Book Works

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1901
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 430 pages

Download or read book Works written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Songs and Scenes from Goethe s Faust

Download or read book Songs and Scenes from Goethe s Faust written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Selected Poetry

    Book Details:
  • Author : Goethe
  • Publisher : Penguin UK
  • Release : 2005-04-28
  • ISBN : 0141912200
  • Pages : 336 pages

Download or read book Selected Poetry written by Goethe and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Shall I embrace you, must I let you go? Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!' Goethe viewed the writing of poetry as essentially autobiographical and the works selected in this volume represent over sixty years in the life of the poet. In early poems such as 'Prometheus' he rails against religion in an almost ecstatic fervour, while 'To the Moon' is an enigmatic meditation on the end of a love affair. The Roman Elegies show Goethe's use of Classical metres in homage to abcient Rome and its poets, and 'The Diary' , supressed for more than a century, is a narrative poem whose eroticism is unusually combined with its morality. Arranged chronologically, David Luke's verse translations are set alonjgside the German orginals to give a picture of Goethe's poetic development. This edition also includes an introduction and notes placing the poems in the context of the poet's life and times.

Book Faust

    Book Details:
  • Author : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Publisher : Anchor
  • Release : 1963
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 518 pages

Download or read book Faust written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1963 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a man's wager with the Devil.

Book The Awful German Language

Download or read book The Awful German Language written by Mark Twain and published by BVK. This book was released on 1880-05-15 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Awful German Language” is a humorous examination of the German language and the frustrations a native English speaker may have when learning it. The essay was published as Appendix D of “A Tramp Abroad” by Mark Twain in 1880.