EAN: 9783838209814

LITERATURE AND THE CULT OF PERSONALITY - GREGOR...

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was
the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural
politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe's authority  a previously
hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth
century to the threshold of Modernism  is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality.
Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process  and
Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary
Wollstonecraft  Henry Crabb Robinson  the canonical Romantic poets  Thomas Carlyle  Margaret
Fuller  George Eliot  Matthew Arnold  and others. For women writers and Jacobins  Scots  and
Americans  translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the
myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors
provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary
development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship
of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined
in this book  textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role  in its place  a full-blown
cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is
more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.

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