Models of Wholeness: Some Attitudes to Language, Art and Life in the Age of Goethe

by Jeremy Adler, Martin Swales, Ann Weaver

This volume assembles thirteen essays by two of the greatest British Germanists, Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby. The essays are presented chronologically from 1942 to 1969 and offer extraordinary insights into Goethe’s works and Schiller’s aesthetics. They demonstrate the ways in which and the extent to which Wilkinson and Willoughby in their thirty-five years of collaboration reshaped the study of Goethe and Schiller in the United Kingdom with their combination of critical intelligence, historical awareness and literary panache. These essays are fresh and immediate – not simply because Wilkinson and Willoughby wrote so well, but also because their arguments have much to contribute to literary studies in the present Age of Theory. By their analyses they show how Goethe and Schiller provide us with intellectual models and an understanding of the importance of art for life. ‘Wholeness’ is the key concept which permeates these essays; it is testimony to what criticism can achieve when the whole man and the whole woman act in unison.

271 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2002

About the author

Jeremy Adler is Professor of German at King’s College London. He studied German at Queen Mary College (University of London) and was a Lecturer in German at Westfield College before being awarded a Personal Chair. He is a sometime fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin, and a sometime scholar of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

He has written a book on Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities (1987) and (with Ulrich Ernst) has produced a catalogue of visual poetry, Text als Figur (third edition, 1990). He has published several volumes of poetry, including The Wedding and other Marriages (1980), The Electric Alphabet (1986; second edition, 1996, internet edition, 1997) and At the Edge of the World (1995).

Jeremy Adler is married and lives in London.