The Last of Homer’s Children: Goethe Singing Epic
Author: Amy Vail
Date Of Publication: Apr 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1938-1
Isbn: 1-4438-1938-7
While Goethe loved Homeric epic, at the same time, the figure of Homer himself was a source of deep literary anxiety for him. Goethe could translate epic, even masterfully, but he shrunk back from attempting to compose a serious full-length epic of his own. “Who could vie with the great nonpareil?” he wrote.

Reading Wolf’s Prolegomena was a significant turning point for Goethe. So greatly had he revered his Homer, that at first, he angrily rejected the idea of an Iliad and Odyssey composed by a succession of illiterate rhapsodes. Gradually, however, with the help of scholarly Weimar friends, he allowed himself to be convinced.

Once freed from the idea of a single, monolithic Homer, Goethe experienced a joyous creative rebirth. Why should he not be a rhapsode himself, if only the last of Homer’s children? The result was an idyll: Herman und Dorothea, which he adorned with nostalgic love, a hero and heroine on a truly Homeric scale, and a fruitful and thoroughly German landscape.

With Hermann und Dorothea, Goethe honored not only Homer, but also his own people and times, celebrating what rhapsodes have always sung: the shadow of war and the love of home.

Amy Vail, formerly Assistant Professor of Classics in the Honors College at Baylor University, teaches Latin in Indianapolis, Indiana. She has published an article and a book chapter on C.S. Lewis’ use of Latin, and has edited and annotated the classical material in two major works by Owen Barfield.

“Amy E. K. Vail is sheds new light on Goethe’s responses to the Iliad and Odyssey, especially on his creation of Hermann und Dorothea, an epic perhaps as much Homeric as it is Goethean. Her study also revisits and gives a fresh reading to eighteenth-century German attitudes toward Homeric epic and on Goethe’s idiosyncratic and deeply personal engagement with classical texts. This book, to date the only full length study of Goethe’s reading’s of Homer, has profited greatly from the expertise of an outstanding Homeric scholar combined with that of an excellent reader of German eighteenth-century literature and Goethe.

Amy Vail’s clearly articulated and systematically applied critical perspective results in a perceptive and illuminating reading of Herman and Dorothea. Eloquently, convincingly, and with a wealth of insights, observations, and close readings drawn from a variety of Goethe texts, this book details how in his writings Goethe brought to a creative and fruitful culmination all of his years of Homeric study. The Last of Homer’s Children is a very important contribution to Homeric studies and to Goethe scholarship alike. For any scholar interested in understanding what E. M. Butler rhetorically called The Tyranny of Greece over German, Amy Vail’s perceptive and sensitive study is essential reading.”

—Barbara Becker-Cantarino is Research Professor in German at the Ohio State University; her publications contain articles on Wilhelm Meister, demonism and infanticide in Faust, Goethe as a critic of women writers , and Goethe and gender. Among her recent books publications are The Eighteenth Century. Enlightenment and Sentimentality, Vol. 5 of The Camden House History of German Literature, Boydell & Brewer: Rochester, NY, 2005, and Pietism and Women’s Autobiography. The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Written by Herself (1689/1719). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Price Us Usd: 59.99