A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus Reviews 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.

This bibliography was commissioned by the English Goethe Society as a contribution to the celebration in 1999 of the 250th anniversary of Goethes birth. It sets out to record translations of his works into English that have been published in the twentieth century, up to and including material published in that anniversary year. It aims to serve as wide a constituency as possible, be it as a simple reference tool for tracing a translation of a given work or as a documentary source for specialized studies of Goethe reception in the English-speaking world. The work records publications during the century, not merely translations that originated during this period. It includes numerous reprintings of older material, as well as some belated first publications of translations from the nineteenth century. It shows how frequent and how long enduring was the recourse of publishers and anthologists to a Goethe Victorian in diction, a signal factor in perceptions and misperceptions. Derek Glass was putting the finishing touches to the bibliography at the time of his sudden death in March 2004. Colleagues at Kings College London have edited the final manuscript, which is now published jointly by the English Goethe Society and the Modern Humanities Research Association both as a worthy commemoration of Goethes anniversary and as a tribute to Derek himself.

A concise survey and criticism of Goethe's work, for the general reader and the student.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies