Outing Goethe & His Age - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804726159 ISBN 13: 9780804726153

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

When Goethe christened the 1700's "the Century of Winckelmann" and Kant dubbed it "the Century of Frederick the Great," they invoked two notorious figures in gay history. This collection of twelve essays reclaims "the Age of Goethe"―To call upon a literary designation of roughly the same period - as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters.

This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany. The literature of this era bequeathed to us the cultural inventions of Romantic love, classical femininity, the marriage partnership, and the aesthetics of beauty - all, as this volume demonstrates, via and despite the ever-resurgent erotic desire for one's own sex. In the process, it offers radically new readings of canonical authors - including Wieland, Lenz, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Kleist ― in light of the eroticized same-sex relations in their works.

About this title

From the Back Cover

When Goethe christened the 1700's "the Century of Winckelmann" and Kant dubbed it "the Century of Frederick the Great", they invoked two notorious figures in gay history. This collection of twelve essays reclaims "the Age of Goethe" - to call upon a literary designation of roughly the same period - as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters. This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany. The literature of this era bequeathed to us the cultural inventions of Romantic love, classical femininity, the marriage partnership, and the aesthetics of beauty - all, as this volume demonstrates, via and despite the ever-resurgent erotic desire for one's own sex. In the process, it offers radically new readings of canonical authors - including Wieland, Lenz, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Kleist - in light of the eroticized same-sex relations in their works.

Synopsis

This collection of twelve essays reclaims "the age of Goethe" as a time when same-sex erotic attraction suffused artistic production from Winckelmann's art treatises and Goethe's plays to Friedrich Schlegel's self-reflexive novel Lucinde and Kleist's letters. This volume employs historical, biographical, and textual evidence to paint a cohesive picture of the incontrovertibly sexual nature of male-male and female-female relationships in late-18th and early-19th-century Germany. The essays show how sexual and gender orientation during the age of Goethe, though blurred, was constantly being restructured, often in a way that coopted "queerness" into reifying heterosexuality. As a result, around the first decade of the 19th century the contours of "the closet" began to form. The book as a whole testifies to the centrality of this period for gay and lesbian archaeology, offers ways to read for homosexuality in pre-20th-century authors, and argues strongly for "the birth of aesthetics out of the spirit of homoeroticism".

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804726159
• ISBN 13: 9780804726153
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Kuzniar Alice A.