In 1880 Nietzsche 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, Goethe's 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 Goethe's creative life, rendered by Boyle in captivating detail, saw the early conception of Faust, and Goethe's 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 novel's young hero. Napoleon claimed to have read Goethe's 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 Goethe's 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. Boyle's 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. Volume II, The Age of Renunciation, is in preparation.

Goethe: The Poet and the Age (1749-1790)

Biographies & Memoirs

Boyle, Nicholas

Arts & Literature

Oxford University Press

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 cultural nucleus, there was no single "Age of Goethe." Instead, Goethe's 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 Goethe's creative life, rendered by Boyle in captivating detail, saw the early conception of Faust, and Goethe's 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 novel's young hero. Napoleon claimed to have read Goethe's 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 Goethe's 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. Boyle's 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.

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

When Volume I of Nicholas Boyle's biography of Goethe appeared, it received an avalanche of praise on both sides of the Atlantic. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called it "the best biography of Goethe in English." Doris Lessing, in The Independent, called it "biography at its best." And The New York Times Book Review hailed it as "a remarkable achievement," adding "there is nothing comparable to this study in any language." Now comes the second volume of this definitive portrait, published on the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth. Here Nicholas Boyle chronicles the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution--which turned Goethe's life upside down--and of the philosophical revolution in Germany which ushered in the periods of Idealism and Romanticism. It was also a period dominated by two intense personal relationships--with Schiller, Weimar's other great poet, philosopher, and dramatist, and with Christiana Vulpius, the mother of his son. Boyle paints vivid portraits of Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars, of the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which for ten years made Jena the intellectual capital of Europe, and of the upheavals sparked by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire. Boyle captures both the large-scale events that swept Europe and the personal dramas of this exciting time. And he offers brilliant new analyses of Goethe's works of the period, most notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust. Indeed, this volume is a major work of historical and literary scholarship, and an important biography of one of the giants of Western culture.

German literature in all genres and from all historical periods has exerted an enormous influence on the history of western thought. From Martin Luther, Frederick Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Gunter Grass, Germany has produced an impressive number of great writers and great works. In German Literature: A Very Short Introduction, Nicholas Boyle illuminates the particular character and power of German literature and explores its impact on the larger cultural world. Boyle presents an engrossing tour of German literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, focussing especially on the last 250 years. He examines key themes like idealism, modernism, materialism, trauma and memory, showing how they have imbued the great German writers with such distinctive voices. Indeed, this brief introduction offers broad coverage of German literature, revealing the links between German literature and the German nation, examining the literary and philosophical responses of German writers to social, political, and economic change, and seeking out the connections between Germany's intellectual traditions and its often violent and tragic history. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

German Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Goethe: The Poet and the Age

Boyles (German literary and intellectual history, U. of Cambridge) argues for a deep link among politics, religion, philosophy, and literature in an era when the dominant dichotomy is shifting from Christian democracy versus atheist Communist to diversity and pluralism versus global unification. He is generally optimistic about an emerging supra-national order, but wonders about whether we are more than consumers and producers, whether a Christian perspective is viable in such a secular world, and other questions. Four of the ten essays are revised from publication in the English Dominican journal New Blackfriars . Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney

Reference

University of Notre Dame Press

Along with the spectacular collapse in 1989 of the perspectives imposed by the Cold War, the false certainties of the national and imperial age which shaped our collective and individual identity fell away as well. As we try to regroup and redefine ourselves and our social bonds, we must take into account two seemingly contradictory forces: the trend toward diversity and pluralism, on the one hand, and the pull toward ever greater unification, on the other. In this book, Nicholas Boyle offers ten studies of the implications of the increasingly integrated world economic structure for our sense of political, cultural, and personal identity. He argues for the deep interconnectedness of politics, religion, philosophy, and literature and their shared inseparability from the economic base. In the process, he uses philosophical and literary ideas to establish systematic grounds for optimism about an emerging supra-national order, aiming to restore the possibility of "grand narrative" to our collective past and future. However, his exploration of the global mind does not ignore the many haunting personal questions raised by the upheaval of the 90s: Are we more than consumers and producers? To what extent do our nationhood, our gender, our religious and cultural affiliations still define us? Is a Christian perspective viable in such a secular world? Can literature and philosophy make sense of individual lives? What role will the intellectual class play? Boyle takes a close look at Germany and Britain, their differences and growing similarity. He discusses, among others, Thatcher, Fukuyama, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Seamus Heaney. Boyle asserts that as the world becomes less divided but more disparate, and its order less draconian but more precarious, choosing the paths most likely to lead to justice and peace will reform our shattered sense of identity.

Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the largely neglected task of integrating theology and modern secular culture. Boyle explores two lines of thought. In the first series of essays, he discusses a range of writers, primarily philosophers and theologians, who have treated the Bible as literature as a means of reconciling the sacred and the secular. In the second series, Boyle moves to the theme of literature as Bible, seeking a Catholic way of reading secular literature. These sophisticated and learned essays--drawn from the Erasmus Lectures Boyle delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2003--cover a remarkable range of philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Levinas, Goethe, Austen, Melville, and Tolkien. This volume will reward its reader with penetrating, and often brilliant, insights.

Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the largely neglected task of integrating theology and modern secular culture. Boyle explores two lines of thought. In the first series of essays, he discusses a range of writers, primarily philosophers and theologians, who have treated the Bible as literature as a means of reconciling the sacred and the secular. In the second series, Boyle moves to the theme of literature as Bible, seeking a Catholic way of reading secular literature. These sophisticated and learned essays--drawn from the Erasmus Lectures Boyle delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2003--cover a remarkable range of philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Levinas, Goethe, Austen, Melville, and Tolkien. This volume will reward its reader with penetrating, and often brilliant, insights.

Goethe: Faust Part One (Landmarks of World Literature)

Nicholas Boyle begins with a fascinating survey of earlier versions of the Faust story. He then offers a detailed reading of Faust Part One, emphasising the poetic and dramatic coherence of the work and tracing its links with the thought and culture of Goethe's time. The play emerges as a tragic poem which may, to a certain extent, be read independently of Faust Part Two.

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boyle, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Boyle, Nicholas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boyle, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Goethe: The Poet and the Age (1749-1790)

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

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

German Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Goethe: The Poet and the Age

Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney

Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney

Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

Goethe: Faust Part One (Landmarks of World Literature)