Literature and the Cult of Personality. Essays on Goethe and His Influence

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe's authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.

Autorentext

The Charisma of Animals is Gregory Maertz's first volume of verse. Completed during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poems presented here incorporate structural and sonic echoes of formalism in brief lyrics and longer narratives which seek to make transient, intensely personal experiences-love and loss, illness and recovery, encounters with nature and animals, history and works of art-concrete and accessible. They belong to the province of sensations, memories, dreams, and sacred places in Maertz's personal mythology: the fishing village of Gravir in the Outer Hebrides (home of Eriskay ponies, the eponymous white horses), the Hawaiian Islands, Lake Minnetonka, Manhattan, Heidelberg, Munich, Bergen, Paris, and Griggstown, an historic village on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey, where he makes his home with Hooksy, a big orange tabby, in a former cidery.

Zusammenfassung
"Literature and the Cult of Personality, wide ranging and comparative in scope, brilliantly examines the strong impact of Goethe-his force as intellect, writer, and modern personality-on British literature and culture. Offering insight after insight, Maertz masterfully outlines how the Goethezeit occurred in Great Britain, too, and that Goethe's presence is part of the late Enlightenment and Romantic era everywhere." -James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University