{"product_id":"goethe-the-poet-and-the-age-9780198158660","title":"Goethe: The Poet and the Age","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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 cultural nucleus  there was no single \"Age of Goethe.\" Instead  Goethes life spanned a great divide in European history: half was spent under a monarchy  and half under a middle-class bureaucracy. The first forty years of Goethes creative life  rendered by Boyle in captivating detail  saw the early conception of Faust  and Goethes rise to literary fame on the heels of his bestselling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther  a book which captured the European imagination like no other before it. Werther became a fashion in a strikingly contemporary sense: impassioned readers imitated the clothing  the sentiments  and even the tragic suicide of the novels young hero. Napoleon claimed to have read Goethes book seven times  and years later Mary Shelley cited it as the first book read by the monster she created in Frankenstein. Boyle provides not only close and provocative readings of Goethes literary works  but also a vivid portrayal of a convulsive age of revolution  including insights into Weimar court life  and accounts of other master thinkers like Lessing and Schiller. Part social history  part literary criticism  this is biography on a grand scale--as sweeping and magnificent as the life it portrays. Boyles work is accessible to anyone  and does not assume a prior knowledge of German history or literature  but it is also rigorous and original--a major work of scholarship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45279818776629,"sku":"ByrdShop_0198158661","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780198158660.jpg?v=1780611922","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/goethe-the-poet-and-the-age-9780198158660","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}