Search results for ""Author Gregory Maertz""

Gregory Maertz has written extensively on Romantic and Modern literature, art, and ideas. In these nine related essays, he investigates the expression of Romanticism in literature, philosophy, and cultural politics from the Renaissance to Modernism. The comparative essays in Part One examine the affinity between the religious logic of Sir Thomas Browne and Søren Kierkegaard; Tolstoys enduring attraction to Schopenhauers thought; Rilkes debts to the sculptor Rodin; the identification of an early novel by William Godwin as the chief precursor text to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein; and the corresponding literary projects of Osip Mandelstam, Rilke, and David Jones. In Part Two the essays are clustered around the literary activity of writers and philosophers associated with radicalism in Britain and transcendentalism in America: a reconsideration of the life of William Godwin; the central role played by English radicals in the transmission of German literature; Godwins innovations in travel fiction; and the crystallization of authorial identity around the influence of Goethe in the work of women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot.

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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 centre of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethes 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 this book. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and this book 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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George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." The complex main plot and many subplots revolve around Dorothea Brooke, an ardent young woman, and her relationship to three men: Casaubon, a clergyman and scholar twice her age; Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who shares Dorothea's enthusiasm for reform but whose flaws compromise his ambitions; and Will Ladislaw, a young man of mysterious origins, romantic temperament, and artistic inclinations. A female Bildungsroman and a study of character and society in the realistic mode pioneered by Balzac, Middlemarch is also an historical novel that offers a panorama of English society in an era of social reform and political agitation.This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of contextual materials, including contemporary reviews of the novel, other writings by George Eliot (essays, reviews, and criticism), and historical documents pertaining to medical reform, religious freedom, and the advent of the railroads.

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On the Genealogy of Morality is a history of ethics, a text about interpreting that history, and a primer on interpretation in general. It also has elements of archaeology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and etymology. Nietzsche's history-based approach to the development of morality, as well as his keen understanding of how power relations - especially the role played in this process by social, class, and racial divisions - continue to shape our ethical norms and standards of behavior. His reading of history and the human capacity for rationalization anticipated, influenced, and underpinned the interpretative techniques and strategies that emerged as dominant in the humanities and social sciences over the past several decades. In this age of 'alternative truths,' Nietzsche's insight into the nature of interpretation is more valuable than ever before.

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