From Goethe to Novalis

Wolfgang Mieder is Professor of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont, where he has taught for many years together with his colleague and friend Dennis F. Mahoney. Mieder is known for his proverb studies: some of his more recent books include «Making a Way Out of No Way»: Martin Luther King’s Sermonic Proverbial Rhetoric (2010), Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age (2012), and «All Men and Women Are Created Equal»: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s Proverbial Rhetoric Promoting Women’s Rights (2015).

Contents: Goethe Seen Anew: Egon Günther’s Film Lotte in Weimar – The Thematic Significance of Astrology in Schiller’s Wallenstein – The French Revolution as Volcano: Goethe and Georg Forster – Primeval Formation: Teaching Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with the Help of Goethe’s Urworte. Orphisch – Goethe’s Autobiographical Writings – Schiller’s Der Geisterseher: A Princely Experiment or, the Creation of a »«piritualist» – On the Periphery of Weimar Classicism: Passion, Patriarchy and Political Machinations in Caroline von Wolzogen’s Agnes von Lilien (1797) and Barbara Honigmann’s Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991) – Maria Stuart Adaptations in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: From «Classica» Parodies to Contemporary Politics – The French Revolution and the Bildungsroman – «Painting the Red Flower Blue»: Developments in Research on the Novels of the Age of Goethe since 1968 – The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the «Age of Goethe» – The Channeling of a Literary Revolution: Goethe, Schiller, and the Genesis of German Romanticism – The Myth of Death and Resurrection in Heinrich von Ofterdingen – Double into Doppelgänger: The Genesis of the Doppelgänger-Motif in the Novels of Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann – «Stages of Enlightenment»: Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen – A «Schützenkönig» for Kuhschnappel: Social Reality and Wish Projection in Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs – Human History as Natural History in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen – «Was nicht ist, kann noch werden»: Proverbs and German Romanticism – Old, New, and (Un)Known Worlds: History and Fiction in Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World – Romanticizing the Everyday: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower – Double Trouble: Uncanny Secrets in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s and Otto Ludwig’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi.