Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Romanticism, Mimesis, and the Novel
- 2 Double-Entry Imagery: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
- 3 Imitation and Indolence: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde
- 4 Imitation and Simulation: Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen
- 5 Beyond Romantic Representation: Clemens Brentano's Godwi
- Conclusions: Mimesis and the Critical Politics of Romanticism
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Beyond Romantic Representation: Clemens Brentano's Godwi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Romanticism, Mimesis, and the Novel
- 2 Double-Entry Imagery: Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
- 3 Imitation and Indolence: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde
- 4 Imitation and Simulation: Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen
- 5 Beyond Romantic Representation: Clemens Brentano's Godwi
- Conclusions: Mimesis and the Critical Politics of Romanticism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Die Kunst? o die Kunst sie ist nur künstlich. Aber sie ist nie mehr als ein Grabmahl der Liebe geweßen. Sie ist ein scharfes Augenglaß, wir sehen als mit den Farben des Regenbogens umspielt, nie ersezt sie das reine Sehen der Liebe. (FBA XXIX, 267)
Clemens Brentano wrote most of his first and only completed novel, Godwi oder Das steinerne Bild der Mutter: Ein verwilderter Roman, in the environment of Jena around the year 1800, in the overshadowing presence of Friedrich Schlegel and his circle. Published in two volumes in 1801 and 1802 by Friedrich Wilmans in Bremen, it is generally regarded as a typical, though perhaps unsuccessful, expression of the early romantic theory of the novel and the product of a far-from-independent young author. Studying medicine in Jena during the critical years of early romanticism (1798–1801), the young aspiring writer came in contact with the main figures of the movement: the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Tieck, whom he admired enormously. Letters reveal, however, that the relationship between Brentano and Friedrich Schlegel, the natural leader of the clique, became strained almost immediately, and by 1801 when Brentano left Jena and got to know Ludwig Achim von Arnim, he had already distanced himself both socially and aesthetically from the Jena romantics. In Heidelberg, the two friends, together with Eichendorff and Görres, founded a new tradition in German romanticism, the Heidelberger Romantik with its antitheoretical and national, not to say nationalistic, penchant.
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- Information
- MetamimesisImitation in Goethe's 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre' and Early German Romanticism, pp. 155 - 188Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012