Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy

In the decades after its publication Goethe''s Wilhelm Meister''s Apprenticeship served as a touchstone for such major philosophical and literary figures as Schopenhauer Schleiermacher and Schlegel and was widely understood to be one of the greatest novels of the German canon. But in the decades and centuries following the attention it has received in both disciplines has diminished in comparison to either Goethe''s Sorrows of Young Werther or his Elective Affinities. This volume follows the impetus of its early respondents to examine deeply what exactly Goethe''s long and complicated novel is doing and how it engages with problems and themes of human life. An interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars grapple with the novel''s engagement with central philosophical questions such as individuality development and authority; aesthetic formation and narrative (and human) contingency; and gender sexuality and marriage. That these questions and their working-through in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre are in tension with one another speaks ultimately to how literature explores philosophical questions in ways that are open-ended creative and contain potential for new and different solutions to living with them. This unique philosophical approach to the form and purpose of a literary masterpiece illuminates new inroads into a novel at once famously complex and influential and into the projects of one Germany''s greatest writers.