John argues that shifting the focus from the text to the efficacy of performance requires broadening our concept of performance beyond what occurs on stage and its critical reception to include the daily life of the society that provides its context. It follows from this semiotic approach that there can be no fixed text or understanding of Egmont or of Goethe himself - only multiple images. John's exploration of image includes literary motifs, acting, staging, and social role playing, with particular reference to Goethe's development as an artist and cultural icon. In addition to presenting a comprehensive analysis of the play and a discussion of Egmont's reception from its first appearance to the present (including productions on both stage and screen), John provides an in-depth performance analysis based on the theories of Alter, Burns, Carson, Fischer-Lichte, Goffman, Pavis, and Schechner. The book includes the complete Mannheim manuscript (M372), critically edited and published as a performance text for the first time.

In this, the second volume of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Nicholas Boyle covers the most eventful and crowded years of Goethe's life: the period of the French Revolution, which turned his life upside down, and of the German philosophical revolution which ushered in the periods of Idealismand 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. Goethe was a poet of supreme intelligence and sensitivity living through political andintellectual changes which have shaped the modern world. The transition into modernity is the theme of this volume: Goethe's harrowing experiences of the Revolutionary wars; the explosion of new ideas in philosophy and literature which he absorbed and adapted and which for ten years made Jena theintellectual capital of Europe; the political upheaval initiated by Napoleon which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in which Goethe had grown up, and with it the cultural role he had envisaged for Jena and Weimar. Boyle vividly narrates both the large-scale events and the personal dramas of thisexciting time, to give lucid accounts of important thinkers whom English readers have hitherto found inaccessible, and to analyse in new ways Goethe's works of the period, notably Wilhelm Meister, The Natural Daughter, and Faust.

To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller's death, leading scholars from Germany, Canada, the UK and the USA have contributed to this volume of commemorative essays. These were first presented at a symposium held at the University of Birmingham in June 2005. The essays collected here shed important new light on Schiller's standing as a national and transnational figure, both in his own lifetime and in the two hundred years since his death. Issues explored include: aspects of Schiller's life and work which contributed to the creation of heroic and nationalist myths of the poet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his activities as man of the theatre and publisher in his own, pre-national context; the (trans-)national dimensions of Schiller's poetic and dramatic achievement in their contemporary context and with reference to later appropriations of national(ist) elements in his work. The contributions to this volume illuminate Schiller's achievements as poet, playwright, thinker and historian, and bring acute insights to bear on both the history of his impact in a variety of contexts and his enduring importance as a point of cultural reference.

Bennett reviews a number of Goethe's works, offering a new interpretation of Werther, fresh insights into Die natürliche Tochter, and an assessment of Die Wahlverwandtschaften that reveals Goethe's feminine voice. He establishes parallels between Goethe's position and that of modern radical feminism regarding the problem of literary revolution. -- book jacket.

Germany’s political and cultural past from ancient times through World War II has dimmed the legacy of its Enlightenment, which these days is far outshone by those of France and Scotland. In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany’s Enlightenment. Reed looks closely at the arguments, achievements, conflicts, and controversies of these major thinkers and how their development of a lucid and active liberal thinking matured in the late eighteenth century into an imaginative branching that ran through philosophy, theology, literature, historiography, science, and politics. He traces the various pathways of their thought and how one engendered another, from the principle of thinking for oneself to the development of a critical epistemology; from literature’s assessment of the past to the formulation of a poetic ideal of human development. Ultimately, Reed shows how the ideas of the German Enlightenment have proven their value in modern secular democracies and are still of great relevance—despite their frequent dismissal—to us in the twenty-first century.