Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology: Man and Other Plants. Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the...
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For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analyzed. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe and Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahllverwandtschaften.