The novel as archive1998

"A fresh study of one of the most perplexing and daring novels ever written, one that was largely misunderstood when it first appeared, and which has emerged only in the last two decades as a work that pointed forward, stylistically and structurally, to the modernist novels of the twentieth century. Goethe's contemporaries not only failed to understand the work, but some of them criticized it as the inferior work of a fading talent. Bahr shows how Goethe subordinated the role of the author-narrator, making use of a variety of sophisticated narrative devices, such as the invention of an "editor" working with "archival" materials and interpolated novellas (some of whose characters appear as "real" figures in the novel itself) to distance himself from the work and thus ironize its apparent...