No detailed description available for "Phantom Formations".

A fresh reading of the Willhelm Meister novels that dismisses the notion of the Bildungsroman to reveal unities between the texts.

Professor Bruford shows how the ideal of self-cultivation entered into the thought of a number of highly individual German philosophers, theologians, poets and novelists.

A major new study of Robert Musil by one of the world's leading Musil scholars. Musil's extraordinary works, the study reveals, emerged from the problem of the "two cultures."

Published in 1979, this study is intended as a continuation of the work of the scholars and previous commentators on Goethe's Wanderjahre. While considering the scientific structure, it concentrates first on one basic question of form--that of the series of narrative insertions--and then of necessity on one matter of content that is linked so closely with them that the two are almost inseparable, namely the concept of the family as the Urform (archetype) and metamorphosis of the types of human association. Thus the intention of this book is to contribute to the new and better understanding of the novel and which will, it is to be hoped, at long last help the work take its place as one of the two crowning masterpieces (along with Faust II) of Goethe's life.

Gustafson goes beyond the medical, psychoanalytical, and legal discourses that Foucault viewed as the initiators of modern sexual identities to explore the literature and discourse of male-male desire a century earlier, within the tradition of German Classicism. Reading such authors as Goethe, Winckelman, and Moritz, she finds a self-conscious formulation of same-sex desire leading to a sense of identity and community."--BOOK JACKET.