Goethe and the Greeks

Goethe and the Greeks
Author: Humphry Trevelyan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1981-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521284714

'The revolution that is going on in me is that which has taken place in every artist who has studied Nature long and diligently and now seeks the remains of the great spirit of antiquity; his soul wells up, he feels a transfiguration of himself from within, a feeling of freer life, higher existence, lightness and grace.' It is Mr Trevelyan's purpose, in this profoundly interesting book, to trace the course of this development in Goethe, to determine its extent, to test its sincerity. To this task he brings, not only a complete knowledge of Goethe's life and works and of classical literature, but also a fine critical sense which enables him to direct his detailed knowledge towards a philosophical conclusion.' So wrote Herbert Read in The Spectator in December 1941 on the first publication of Goethe and the Greeks. Trevalyan's account of Goethe's fascination with the Greeks, his striving to master their culture, his vision of Hellenic man, is judged not to have been supplanted by any later work in English. Professor Lloyd-Jones has written a substantial Foreword for this reissue of Trevelyan's book, giving his own assessment of Goethe's search for Hellenism and its influence on his work.

The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany

The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany
Author: E. M. Butler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107697646

This 1935 book studies the powerful influence exercised by Ancient Greek culture on German writers from the eighteenth century onwards.

Ibsen and the Greeks

Ibsen and the Greeks
Author: Norman Rhodes
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838752982

"Was Ibsen influenced by Greek culture? Were allusions to the Greeks configured in the Norwegian playwright's works? According to author Norman Rhodes, whether consciously or unconsciously, many of Ibsen's plays are encoded with veiled references to ancient Greek culture. Rhodes also postulates that Ibsen's perception of the importance of the Greeks was most likely mediated to him through German Romanticism and Scandinavian culture." "According to Rhodes, numerous echoes of Greek literature resonate in such early Ibsen plays as Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljerkrans, and Love's Comedy. Ibsen's Brand and Peer Gynt are a dialectic pair which in key ways are suggestive of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, A Doll House has important parallels with Sophocles' Antigone, and An Enemy of the People correlates with both Plato's Apology and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. Moreover, a Euripidean sense of fatal irrationality seems inscribed in Ibsen's final plays: the protagonists John Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, Master Builder Solness, John Gabriel Borkman, and the sculptor Rubek all destroy themselves."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Placing Modern Greece

Placing Modern Greece
Author: Constanze Guthenke
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2008-02-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191528307

Placing Modern Greece is about literary representations of Greece in the period of Romanticism, encompassing the time in the 1820s when it became a territorial and political reality as a nation state. Constanze Guthenke claims that the imagining of and attitude towards Greece was shaped by a fascination with the material, and by the highly conceptualized tension between the ideal on the one hand, and the material on the other. Her study focuses on nature and landscape imagery as vehicles of representation, on their specific inner workings, and on their dynamic, which conditions how and whether Greece as a modern entity in the making can be represented at all. Offering readings from German and contemporaneous Greek authors, Guthenke supplies a commentary on the translation and crossings of representational models and their limits.

German Philhellenism

German Philhellenism
Author: D. Valdez
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2015-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781349451081

This book is an account of the modern German fascination with the art, politics and religion of ancient Greece from Winckelmann to Nietzsche's generation.

Ancient Persia in Western History

Ancient Persia in Western History
Author: Sasan Samiei
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2014-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 085773606X

Ancient Persia in Western History is a measured rejoinder to the dominant narrative that considers the Graeco-Persian Wars to be merely the first round of an oft-repeated battle between the despotic 'East' and the broadly enlightened 'West'. Sasan Samiei analyses the historiography which has skewed our understanding of this crucial era - contrasting the work of Edward Gibbon and Goethe, which venerated Classicism and Hellenistic history, with later writers such as John Linton Myres. Finally, Samiei explores the cross-cultural encounters which constituted the Achaemenid period itself, and repositions it as essential to the history of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.