Interpreting Goethe's "Faust" today

About this book

This collection of new essays on Goethe's masterpiece offers samples of the diverse ways in which Faust is being read by leading scholars and teachers on both sides of the Atlantic. Faust has always been intimately tied to Germany's own view of itself; as a new Germany is forged the current understanding of its greatest work of literature will help to shape the identity of the new nation. Like Faust itself, the volume offers neither closed structure nor final conclusions, but illustrates and elaborates the richness of the work. Some of the essays present us with a dramatically new Faust seen in terms of history, gender, the Gothic novel, while others present Faust in the more familiar contexts of irony, technology, and modernism. The three main characters - Faust, the devil, and Margareta - provide the basic categories of organization. There is an additional section on art and representation, which relates the play to the newest developments in critical theory. The book closes with a section on the recent reception of the text in translation and in actual theatrical performance in order to give readers a full view of the status and significance of Goethe's Faust today.