Glorious Devil: Goethe and the Victorian Temptation of Art

FAIN: FA-12136-78

David J. DeLaura
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

To study the growth of a "high" view of art and poetry in Victorian England, and its origins in Germany and to some extent in English Romanticism. The self-consciousness of the 19th century artist was balanced between high hopes for art and persistent fears for its future. Goethe and Schiller will be studied as well as Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. The Victorian "uses" of Goethe touch some of the deepest places in the creative and intellectual struggles of the period.