Peter J. Schwartz. After Jena: Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and the End of the Old Regime
After Jena is the first scholarly work in English to set Goethe’s influential and controversial novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) squarely within the turbulent time in which it was written. Adducing evidence from many spheres and applying the tools of several disciplines, Peter J. Schwartz shows how Elective Affinities reflects changes in marriage, property and inheritance law and in the political role of the German nobility during the era of rapid modernization following Prussia’s defeat at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt (1806), a victory that permitted Napoleon to extend French hegemony throughout Continental Europe and to dissolve or reform the institutional structures of the German ancien régime. Linking questions of character, fate and sacrifice in the novel to modern problems of sovereignty and legitimacy, Schwartz investigates how key scenes in the novel comment implicitly on Napoleon, Rousseau, the French Revolution, and the politics and aesthetics of the German Romantics. The novel’s ethical core is shown to be a calculus of political legitimacy, and its aesthetics a means to conciliate tensions provoked by modernity’s onrush. After Jena will be of special interest to students of literature, history, philosophy, art history and aesthetics.
To be released in the summer of 2009.