Novelle - Critical Essay by Herbert Lehnert

Critical Essay by Herbert Lehnert

SOURCE: “Tensions in Goethe's Novelle,” in Goethe's Narrative Fiction: The Irvine Goethe Symposium, edited by William J. Lillyman, Walter de Gruyter, 1983, pp. 176-92.

In the following excerpt from his full-length treatment of Goethe's fiction, Lehnert explores the inner tensions in Goethe's Novelle, which he maintains adds to the complexity and greatness of Goethe's message that literature can act as a stabilizing social force.

The first reader of the story of the hunt, which Goethe called Novelle, was Johann Peter Eckermann. Under the date of 18 January 1827 in the first part of his Gespräche mit Goethe, he reports how he read the conclusion of the work in Goethe's manuscript and in the author's presence. Eckermann's immediate reaction included, besides admiration, a certain dissatisfaction about the ending which appeared “too desolate, too ideal, too lyrical” to him. Goethe successfully convinced his assistant of the aesthetic necessity of the conclusion as...
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