Goethe, Volume 9

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eric A. Blackall

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691043449, 9783518029633
• eBook ISBN: 9780691213378
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novel

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre—perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story focusing on the growth and self-realization of the main character. The story centers on Wilhelm, a young man living in the mid-1700s who strives to break free from the restrictive bourgeois world of his upbringing and seek fulfillment as an actor and playwright. Goethe's novel had a huge impact on the Romantics. Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, and Schopenhauer considered it one of the most important novels yet written. Schlegel famously called it one of the "three tendencies of the age," along with the French Revolution and the philosophy of Fichte. And Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann composed songs to poems from the novel. It also had a major influence on nineteenth-century British writers, including Thomas Carlyle, who was its first English translator, and George Eliot. Drawn from Princeton's authoritative collected works of Goethe, this is the definitive English version of a landmark of world literature.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Book One
• Book Two
• Book Three
• Book Four
• Book Five
• Book Six: Confessions of a Beautiful Soul
• Book Seven
• Book Eight
• Notes
• Afterword