Name: Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon
Price: 236.22 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Zweig, Stefan
ISBN: 9781138525184

portada Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon

Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon

Type

Physical Book

Author

Stefan Zweig

Publisher

Routledge

Language

English

Pages

340

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9781138525184

Edition No.

Synopsis "Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon"

This is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures. In Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century.Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Hölderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatization of the subjective psyche. Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism.Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. The image of Goethe recurs here as the ultimate upholder of Zweig's own ideals: scientist and artist, receptive to world culture, supremely rational and prudent. Yet Zweig was aware that Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were more daring explorers of the dangerous and destructive aspects of man that needed to be seen and comprehended in the clarifying light of poetry and philosophy.

Stefan Zweig

(Author)

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(Vienna, 1881 – Petrópolis, Brazil, 1942) a very popular writer, both as an essayist and biographer as well as a novelist, he was one of the most versatile writers of the first half of the 20th century. His narrative ability, skill, and delicacy in describing feelings and the elegance of his style make him a fascinating storyteller. He was associated with the great authors of his time: Rilke, Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Tagore, among others. After several decades in which his works were inexplicably ignored, Zweig has been rediscovered and currently enjoys the prestige and popularity that literary justice demanded.

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