
The Spell of Italy
Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe
Richard Block(Author)
Wayne State University Press
Published on 31. March 2006
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-8143-3269-6 (ISBN)
Description
Wearied by his life as an administrator at the Duke's court in Weimar, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe departed unannounced in the middle of the night for what had been the destination of his imagination since childhood: Italy. His extended stay there dramatically affected his views of art, architecture, prose, poetry, and science. When he returned to Germany and Weimar, Goethe's experiences translated into his life and work in ways that influenced countless others as they developed Germany's own brand of high culture. ""The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe"" tracks the peculiar space Italy occupies in the cultural consciousness of German writers by reconsidering the Italian journeys of Goethe and Winckelmann and the legacy of those journeys in the works of Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Mann, Carossa, and Bachmann. Author Richard Block contests previous assumptions about Italy as a place to encounter classical culture and creative rebirth. His study examines the degree to which Germany's literary and cultural traditions appropriated a phantasmic Italy, showing how Winckelmann's art history and Goethe's Italian journey predisposed later writers to search for an aesthetic ideal in Italy that did not exist, and how their search for this absent ideal eventually resulted in disillusionment and deception. Building on previous work on Goethe, literary theory, and cultural history, ""The Spell of Italy"" offers compelling new ways of understanding Germany's fascination with Italy from the eighteenth century to its troubled political history of the twentieth century.
Reviews / Votes
The Spell of Italy is a bracing, invigorating, fast-paced study of the image of Italy in German culture from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. - Robert Tobin, Whitman CollegeMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Detroit, MI
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
622 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8143-3269-6 (9780814332696)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
03/2006
1st Edition
Wayne State University Press
€67.49
Available for download
Person
Richard Block is assistant professor of Germanics and Jewish studies at the University of Washington. He is co-editor of The Spirit of Poesy: Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Thought in Honor of Geza von Molnar (Northwestern University Press, 2000) and translator of Peter Burger's The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism (Northwestern University Press, 2002).'