Goethe's Essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants PDF Download

Author: Rudolph Goethe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Metamorphosis
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 940120375X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists alike debated new ways of thinking about visual culture in the “long eighteenth century”. The essays in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture demonstrate the extent to which Goethe advanced this discourse in virtually all disciplines. The concept of visuality becomes a constitutive moment in a productive relationship between the verbal and visual arts with far-reaching implications for the formation of bourgeois identity, pedagogy, and culture. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to this volume examine the interconnections between aesthetic and scientific fields of inquiry involved in Goethe’s visual identity. By locating Goethe’s position in the examination of visual culture, both established and emerging scholars analyze the degree to which visual aesthetics determined the cultural production of both the German-speaking world and the broader European context. The contributions analyze the production, presentation, and consumption of visual culture defined broadly as painting, sculpture, theater, and scientific practice. The Enlightened Eye promises to invest new energy and insight into the discussion among literary scholars, art historians, and cultural theorists about many aspects of visual culture in the Age of Goethe.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488504X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Much has been written about the golden youth and the Olympian old age of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, poet; less has been written, however, about Goethe the scientist, who, pursuing independent research in many fields, opposed the professional men of his day with brilliant theories of his own. The educated world, familiar with Faust, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister, is not so generally aware of the scientific achievements of the man who had a genus of plants (Goethea) and a mineral (goethite) named for him who coined and first used the word morphology; who contributed to the understanding of the physiology of color; who rediscovered and described the intermaxillary bone in man, propounded the vertebral theory of the skull, formulated a concept in botanical morphology that persists to this day; who discovered the volcanic origin of a mountain; who established the first system of weather stations; who made the first systematic classification of minerals and was among the first to use the comparative method in biology; and who came unwittingly close to achieving the greatest concept in biology—some say the greatest concept in the thinking of man—the theory of organic evolution and the descent of man. Even in those few cases where subsequent research has proved Goethe’s theories to be wrong, his supporting accumulation of facts has proved extremely valuable to science. Goethe was born at the beginning of a great scientific era. But he was a creative thinker; his was not the analytic mind that emphasized fine differences but the synthetic mind that sensed the unity behind the differences. He was also an ardent lover of nature, possessed of unlimited curiosity. Consequently, as a contemporary observed, "Whatever Goeth looked upon in nature immediately acquired the character of a living experience for him." Most of the material translated in this volume is taken from notes and essays which Goethe published from 1817 to 1824 in journal form. Occupying a central position is the most famous and lasting of his scientific writings, the essay on the metamorphosis of plants—an essay which is today considered "one of the minor classics of botany." One of the most important episodes in Goethe's life was his flight to Italy, where he was delighted by the climate and the luxuriance of the plant life. A fan palm in particular attracted his attention because its leaves seemed to exhibit a complete series of transitions from the simple lance-shaped first leaves to the most complex fan type. "At my request," Goethe wrote in his diary, "the gardener cut off an entire sequence of modifications for me, and I burdened myself with several pasteboard containers in which to carry these treasures around." From this beginning Goethe started to evolve his theory of plant metamorphosis, and he returned to Weimar convinced that he had found the secret. The literary student will find much to interest him in this translation—the poet's own account of his grief and suffering at the hands of misunderstanding friends, and his victory over a threatening neurosis. Such essays as "The History of My Botanical Studies" and "The Fate of My Manuscript" throw much light on the crucial middle period of Goethe's life. During Goethe's lifetime and after, there was a tendency to ignore his scientific accomplishments in the face of his literary works. Many felt that they were almost a crime against his poetry. A few, however, contended that in science lay the center and focal point of Goethe's mental life. Goethe, himself, toward the end of his life wrote, "For more than a half century I have been known as a poet, in my own country and undoubtedly also abroad; or at any rate I have been permitted to pass for one. But the fact that I have busily occupied myself with Nature in all her general physical and organic phenomena, constantly and passionately pursuing seriously formulated studies—this is not so generally known; still less has it been accorded any attention." "Minds like Goethe's," Thomas Carlyle said, "are the common property of all nations; and, for many reasons, all should have correct impressions of them." This translation will enable those not familiar with the German language to gain a direct impression of Goethe's mind as expressed in his botanical writings.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Author: Nicholas Boyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192829818
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 852

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The author of Faust, the best-selling sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, of exquisite lyric poetry (set to music by Schubert and Mozart), and of a bewildering variety of other plays, novels, poems, and treatises, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also excelled as an administrator in thecabinet of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Considered by Nietzsche to have been 'not just a good and great man, but an entire culture', Goethe was as vital a part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German social and political life, as he was its cultural nucleus. However, as this perceptive biography shows, the originality ofhis art lay in his complex distance from his times.

Author: Claude Wilson Wardlaw
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719003318
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Author: Derek Glass
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 9781904350323
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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This bibliography was commissioned by the English Goethe Society as a contribution to the celebration in 1999 of the 250th anniversary of Goethes birth. It sets out to record translations of his works into English that have been published in the twentieth century, up to and including material published in that anniversary year. It aims to serve as wide a constituency as possible, be it as a simple reference tool for tracing a translation of a given work or as a documentary source for specialized studies of Goethe reception in the English-speaking world. The work records publications during the century, not merely translations that originated during this period. It includes numerous reprintings of older material, as well as some belated first publications of translations from the nineteenth century. It shows how frequent and how long enduring was the recourse of publishers and anthologists to a Goethe Victorian in diction, a signal factor in perceptions and misperceptions. Derek Glass was putting the finishing touches to the bibliography at the time of his sudden death in March 2004. Colleagues at Kings College London have edited the final manuscript, which is now published jointly by the English Goethe Society and the Modern Humanities Research Association both as a worthy commemoration of Goethes anniversary and as a tribute to Derek himself.

Author: Joseph Paxton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Author: Sir Joseph Paxton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Botany
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Periodical devoted to the illustration in colour of new and uncommon plants grown in British gardens; although primarily horticultural in appeal, it contains the first descriptions of many new species.

Author: Elizabeth Millán Brusslan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030535673
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 722

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This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy. Key Features: • Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, and biology. • Emphasises the important role that women played in the movement’s formation. • Reveals the ways in which German romantic philosophy impacted developments in modernism, existentialism and critical theory in the twentieth century. • Interdisciplinary in approach with contributions from philosophers, Germanists, historians and literary scholars. Providing both broad perspectives and new insights, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars undertaking new research on German romantic philosophy as well as for advanced students requiring a thorough understanding of the subject.