{"product_id":"real-thing-book-ellen-mccarthy-9780345549693","title":"The Real Thing","description":"For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahlverwandtschaften.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49640359395601,"sku":"GOR007247441","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49728979468561,"sku":"GOR007528400","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49773983629585,"sku":"CIN0345549694G","price":2.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50350014005521,"sku":"CIN0345549694A","price":2.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0345549694.jpg?v=1751357208","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/real-thing-book-ellen-mccarthy-9780345549693","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}