Goethe's Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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...

“The looking-glass is not to blame if your own face is plain” - Saying, from Nikolai Gogol’s Government Inspector Orwell, Gogol, Chavchavadze - criticizing society primarily or in a hidden way became popular among classical writers. Highlighting...