Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Provides a fresh interpretation of the nineteenth-century German masterpiece, describes Goethe's attitudes towards writers, composers, and artists, and suggests that he saw all art as a part of a tradition

Literature & Fiction

Brown, Jane K.

Dramas & Plays

Cornell University Press

In this book, Jane K. Brown offers an original reading of Goethe's complex masterpiece in the context of European Romanticism. Looking at the two parts of Faust in sequence, she views the second part as an elaboration of what was implicit in the first, and she clarifies the patterns of thought and organization underlying the play. In Faust, she argues, Goethe not only situates German culture within the wider European literary tradition, but also demonstrates that all literature is by its nature allusive―that it exists only as part of a tradition.

PB see my pictures.Title: Faust:Theater of the World(Twayne's Masterwork Studies Series No.61). Johann Wolfgang Goethe's life and works. Author: Jane K. Brown. Publisher:Twayne Publishers. Cpyrt:1992, full number line. English language. Pages:129. Size 8.4 by 5.3 by .4. ISBN# 0805785574.

Goethe's Faust: Theater of the World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies Series)

History & Criticism

Twayne Pub

The devil is not fundamentally evil, God not essentially good. Faust, though he abandons his beloved to certain death, enters into dubious political schemes and economic swindles, and exploits war to his own advantage, is redeemed. These simple extractions from Goethe's Faust tell of the play's essential modernity, its complexity, and its tendency to confuse. "It is hard to imagine a masterpiece as widely recognized yet as little understood," writes author Jane K. Brown. Yet it is the play's very complexity, she continues, that "has allowed successive ages to read Faust in terms of their own deepest concerns. In Faust: Theater of the World Brown offers a clearly written explication of the play that leads the reader through many levels of interpretation. Written over the course of 60 years that span most of Goethe's working life and the romantic period, the play bears the mark of Goethe's personal growth and development as an artist as well as that of the significant events of his day. Brown notes the influence of the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, materialism, the decline of religious belief, and the flowering of individualism. Faust portrays both the oppressiveness of the old social order and the spiritlessness, doubt, and alienation of the new. Since Goethe's time, Faust has been as much a quintessentially German tale as it has been a story of and for the entire Western world. Brown addresses its reception Goethe's homeland, including the Second Empire's disturbing interpretation of Faust's relentless desire to achieve--and the ultimate forgiveness of his transgression--as a call to German expansionism during World Wars I and II. Faust's redemption at the play's end sets Goethe's version of the Faust legend apart from most others. Brown reviews Goethe's rich and problematic development of the story in the context of the Faust canon, particularly Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Goethe's decision to present Faust, God, and Mephistopheles from conflicting perspectives is closely examined as evidence of his attempt to convey the difficulty of surety in the modern world, the ineffability of truth. It is in his search for a higher, ultimately unknowable truth that Goethe enters the theater of the world--a theater representing human action in relation to the divine cosmos. Central to such drama is its intention to express what is real not in an ordinary sense but in a universal sense. Brown's study manages to convey in down-to-earth language the complex philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic issues raised in Goethe's lofty and often unwieldy masterpiece.

Faust: Theater of the World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

In an impressively comparative work, Jane K. Brown explores the tension in European drama between allegory and neoclassicism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Imitation of nature is generally thought to triumph over religious allegory in the Elizabethan and French classical theater, a shift attributable to the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the Renaissance. But if Aristotle's terminology was rapidly assimilated, Brown demonstrates that change in dramatic practice took place only gradually and partially and that allegory was never fully cast off the stage. 
The book traces a complex history of neoclassicism in which new allegorical forms flourish and older ones are constantly revitalized. Brown reveals the allegorical survivals in the works of such major figures as Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, Vondel, Metastasio, Goethe, and Wagner and reads tragedy, comedy, masque, opera, and school drama together rather than as separate developments. Throughout, she draws illuminating parallels to modes of representation in the visual arts.
A work of broad interest to scholars, teachers, and students of theatrical form, The Persistence of Allegory presents a fundamental rethinking of the history of European drama.

The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner

University of Pennsylvania Press

A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself. Goethe's Allegories of Identity examines how Goethe created the essential bridge between the psychological insights of his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the psychoanalytic theories of his admirer Sigmund Freud.
Equally fascinated and repelled by Rousseau's vision of an unconscious self, Goethe struggled with the moral question of subjectivity: what is the relation of conscience to consciousness? To explore this inner conflict through language, Goethe developed a unique mode of allegorical representation that modernized the long tradition of dramatic personification in European drama. Jane K. Brown's deft, focused readings of Goethe's major dramas and novels, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to Elective Affinities, reveal each text's engagement with the concept of a subconscious or unconscious psyche whose workings are largely inaccessible to the rational mind. As Brown demonstrates, Goethe's representational strategies fashioned a language of subjectivity that deeply influenced the conceptions of important twentieth-century thinkers such as Freud, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt.

Goethe's Allegories of Identity (Haney Foundation Series)

Goethe's Cyclical Narratives: Die Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature, 82)

The University of North Carolina Press

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Books by Brown, Jane K.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brown, Jane K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Goethe's Faust: Theater of the World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies Series)

Faust: Theater of the World (Twayne's Masterwork Studies)

The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner

Goethe's Allegories of Identity (Haney Foundation Series)

Goethe's Cyclical Narratives: Die Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature, 82)