In a patriarchal society, it is common for women to be denounced for their emotional tendencies, specifically being blamed for lacking rational thought. This preconception is seen in a multitude of different literary works, from centuries ago to...

In Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther compares himself with the suitors from Homer's Odyssey. At first his comparison seems only to be an ironic parallel. Like other instances where Werther is over-dramatic and silly in his grand...

From the beginning of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther emphasizes his connection to Nature in order to embellish the tragically creative persona he presents to Wilhelm. As his infatuation with Charlotte grows and he laments the injustice and...

In "The Sorrows of Young Werther", by Goethe, one of the prevalent themes is the control that passion wields over one's actions. Passion may cause one to act irrationally, a belief that Goethe espoused despite the paradigm that dominated the...

As the referent of the individual, the body functions as a site for contradiction, resistance, and reassertion. It embodies a set of rules that delineates individual space through an exclusion of that which is not self. In Goethe's The Sorrows of...

"What wastes my heart away is the corrosive power that lies concealed in the natural universe - in Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbor and itself." (Goethe, 66)

In Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's novella, ...

The novel The Sorrows of Young Werther engages with a complex discourse of communication. It deals with a society highly lacking in personal communication, yet desperately in need of it. Although Werther longs for intimate face to face...

In Plato’s Symposium and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the two protagonists are overcome by their love and dedicate an eulogy in the form of a speech or a series of letters to their beloved. The multitude of letters...

It is presumable that the main character of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is a man from whose thoughts we can glean wise and important statements about life. Throughout many of the passages, Werther offers us his unique perspective on...

Literary critics such as Karl Grun and Johannes Scherr have propped up Johann Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther as revolutionary social criticism that paved the way for many of the rebellions in 1848 – Grun even arguing that the novel prepared...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, made waves in the German literary scene almost immediately upon its publication in 1774. Just five years later, the novel was translated into English, attaining a...

J.W Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is heavy with a sense of malaise, as it describes a young man's decent into mental instability which ends in his suicide. The cause of this sense of malaise lies with the narrator himself, as his own...

In the form of a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) composed the highly emotional Die Leiden des jungen Werther within a matter of weeks. Suitably known as a “Briefroman” in German, the novel is a...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is the embodiment of the Sturm und Drang literary movement that swept through Europe. Werther reached the height of popularity and inspired many young people, even leading them to dress...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) composed the semi-autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther at the young age of 24 and under the timespan of two months. This highly riveting “Briefroman,” as the genre is called in...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther depicts the life of the psychologically troubled Werther, the young protagonist and artist. The novel was one of the earliest examples of the prototypical Romantic figure in literature and...

In Goethe’s Faust, the devil Mephistopheles plays many roles for the benefit of our titular character, but none more overarching, nor all-encompassing, than the Fool. The archetypal Fool can wear many faces, as Mephistopheles assumes the roles of...

In Goethe’s Faust, Faust’s perception of women is a representation of his own inadequacies, while the portrayal of women - the witch’s relationship with magic, and Gretchen’s clear-sightedness - highlight Faust’s own inability to see himself as he...

The purpose of this essay is to investigate to what extent Goethe’s Urfaust can be considered a complete work, or whether its fractured nature destines it to seen only as an unfinished draft that would later become Faust part I. Crucial to...

When reading through Goethe’s version of "The Erl-King," then Carter’s, it is striking how different many of the core elements are between the two stories. Major changes Carter has made include the introduction of a female character and the...

The theatrical device of performing a play within another play has been employed for centuries, most notably in European theatre and literature (Fisher and Greiden xi). The play within a play “describes a strategy for constructing play texts that...

In its own haunting and mysterious way, the line between sanity and insanity can be incredibly blurry at times. Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, is filled with this mysterious case of insanity. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered...

As Benedict Anderson makes evident in Imagined Communities, literature and the nation are often intertwined in a multitude of ways. In the case of Goethe’s Faust, a single work of literature became so meaningful to the German people that they made...

Many novels exist that deal with themes characteristic to their own era, but few exceptional ones incorporate ideas developed much later. One of such examples is Goethe’s Faust, a tragic play about the journey of an alchemist (named Faust, who...