Metamimesis : imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and early German romanticism

Resource Information

The work Metamimesis : imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and early German romanticism represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Metamimesis : imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and early German romanticism

Title remainder

imitation in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and early German romanticism

Statement of responsibility

Mattias Pirholt

Creator

• Pirholt, Mattias, 1975-

Author

• Pirholt, Mattias, 1975-

Subject

• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832
• Romanticism -- Germany
• Mimesis in literature

Language

eng

Summary

Mimesis, or the imitation of nature, is one of the most important concepts in eighteenth-century German literary aesthetics. As the century progressed, classical mimeticism came increasingly under attack, though it also held its position in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Moritz. Much recent scholarship construes Early German Romanticism's refutation of mimeticism as its single distinguishing trait: the Romantics' conception of art as the very negation of the ideal of imitation. In this view, the Romantics saw art as production ('poiesis'): imaginative, musical, transcendent. Mattias Pirholt's book not only problematizes this view of Romanticism, but also shows that reflections on mimesis are foundational for the German Romantic novel, as is Goethe's great pre-Romantic novel 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'. Among the novels examined are Friedrich Schlegel's 'Lucinde', shown to be transgressive in its use of the aesthetics of imitation; Novalis's 'Heinrich von Ofterdingen', interpreted as an attempt to construct the novel as a self-imitating world; and Clemens Brentano's 'Godwi', seen to signal the end of Early Romanticism, both fulfilling and ironically deconstructing the self-reflective mimeticism of the novels that came before it. Mattias Pirholt is a Research Fellow in the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden

Member of

• Online access with EBA: Cambridge Books Online
• Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture
• Online access with EBA: JSTOR

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Dewey number

833/.6

Index

index present

LC call number

PT1982.A43

LC item number

P57 2012

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries