Georg Büchner Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Herbert Lindenberger

Critical Essay by Herbert Lindenberger

SOURCE: Lindenberger, Herbert. “Forebears, Descendants, and Contemporary Kin: Büchner and Literary Tradition.” In Georg Büchner, pp. 115-44. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.

In the following essay, Lindenberger seeks to establish Büchner's position between neoclassical and modern European literature.

Büchner's revolt against a classicism gone stale was by no means the first such revolt in German drama. The Storm-and-Stress writers of the 1770's, in the name of spontaneity and truthfulness to nature, and with Lessing's criticism and Shakespeare's example to back them, had succeeded in clearing the German stage of its dreary, “correct” neoclassical drama—a development of the mid-eighteenth century which, as we now see it, never produced anything of lasting value anyway and whose best-known work, Gottsched's Dying Cato (1730), is nothing more than a pale, academic imitation of French and English plays on the same theme. One can, indeed, look at the history of German drama as a...
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