Nicholas boyle goethe biography

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Goethe: The Poet and the Age

Goethe: The Poet and the Ageis a sweeping two-volume biographyof the German writer and statesman. Written by scholar Nicholas Boyle, the first volume, The Poetry of Desire, was published in 1991, and the second, Revolution and Renunciation, came along in 2000; Oxford University Press published both volumes. Boyle combines an academic approach with accessible language, historical context, and vivid characterizations, creating an all-encompassing portrait of the legendary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a literary and political superman who was both of his time and distinctly separate from it.

The first volume opens with an examination of the world into which Goethe emerged, eighteenth-century Germany. Boyle details the political, cultural, and literary life of the region. Born on August 28, 1749, Goethe grows up in Frankfurt. His parents have several children, but only Johann and his sister, Cornelia, survive beyond infancy.

From an early age, private

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Second Thoughts: A life wrapped up in work: Nicholas Boyle on the desires behind Volume I of Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford, 15 pounds)

Since publishing The Poetry of Desire, the first volume of my biography of Goethe, I have received lots of letters. I suppose the nicest was the one telling me about the W H Heinemann prize. But I am an academic, so the letters which mattered most to me were from people who said they had had little previous knowledge of the subject but had been gripped by my story, and seen its relevance, säga, to understanding Germany since the gods war, even since reunification. I wrote the book as inom did because I believe that the ultimate purpose of the academic study of literature and culture is what is sniffily called popularisation. Moreover, in trying to make your thought interesting to as wide a public as possible, you open the way to a new understanding of its basis.

My book fryst vatten not primarily a literary biography (only one of the reviewers spotted tha

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Nicholas Boyle

British academic

For the American football player, see Nick Boyle.

Nicholas Boyle
Born	(1946-06-18) 18 June 1946 (age 78) London
Occupation	Academic
Nationality	British

Nicholas BoyleFBA (born 18 June 1946) is an English literary critic. He is the emeritus Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has written widely on German literature, intellectual history and religion and is known particularly for his award-winning extensive biography of Goethe (of which two of a projected three volumes have been published).^[1] Boyle became a fellow of the British Academy in 2000.^[2]

Life and work

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Boyle was educated at King's School, Worcester, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was awarded BA and PhD degrees. He was a research fellow at Magdalene from 1968 to 1972, before becoming respectively an assistant lecturer, lecturer, and reader in Germ