Overview

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.

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9780801493904

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Reviews

Brown has provided a fresh, significant reading of Goethe's masterpiece... Her reading goes a long way toward explaining some of the most refractory aspects of the work, such as the nature of Mephisto, of magic and its purpose in the play, and the framed, puzzling Catholic imagery of the final scene of Faust, Part Two. The book is written in a lucid, lively, eminently readable style and succeeds in making the complex comprehensible. -Choice This is a major interpretation of Goethe's Faust, the most challenging and innovative one since Stuart Atkins's 1958 analysis, at least in English, if not in any language. The author accomplishes her goals well: to show that Faust belongs to the genre of non-Aristotelian, illusionist drama; to locate the work within the European literary tradition; and to pursue its epistemological concerns by taking it up scene by scene and act by act. -Journal of English and Germanic Philology This is a highly ambitious effort to provide a unified reading of Faust that will let the work speak to the modern reader-and it achieves this goal with remarkable success. Brown has given us a Faust for our time; she has also persuaded us that this is the Faust Goethe meant us to have. -Neil Flax, University of Michigan, Dearborn

""Brown has provided a fresh, significant reading of Goethe's masterpiece... Her reading goes a long way toward explaining some of the most refractory aspects of the work, such as the nature of Mephisto, of magic and its purpose in the play, and the framed, puzzling Catholic imagery of the final scene of Faust, Part Two. The book is written in a lucid, lively, eminently readable style and succeeds in making the complex comprehensible.""-Choice ""This is a major interpretation of Goethe's Faust, the most challenging and innovative one since Stuart Atkins's 1958 analysis, at least in English, if not in any language. The author accomplishes her goals well: to show that Faust belongs to the genre of non-Aristotelian, illusionist drama; to locate the work within the European literary tradition; and to pursue its epistemological concerns by taking it up scene by scene and act by act.""-Journal of English and Germanic Philology ""This is a highly ambitious effort to provide a unified reading of Faust that will let the work speak to the modern reader-and it achieves this goal with remarkable success. Brown has given us a Faust for our time; she has also persuaded us that this is the Faust Goethe meant us to have.""-Neil Flax, University of Michigan, Dearborn

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