Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology Man and Other Plants [Hardcover]

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe has somehow remained separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analyzed. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context,Goetheand Naturalistic Anthropologydemonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise fromWerthertoDie Wahllverwandtschaften.

A provocative study...valuable for its insights into often overlooked intellectual influences...that made the 'Enlightenment' a far more complex period that is hinted in most literary and cultural histories. --Choice

We are indebted to Bell for offering this original reading, which not only challenges other interpretations of Goethe, but helps characterize his intellectual universe, both before and after the 1800 divide. --Studies in Romanticism