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Eugene L. Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 2000. ? + 279 pp.
Most of this book is much better than its maladroit title would indicate. Of course one's critical reservations are awakened by the use of a term such as "Romantic subject," and all the more so when it is supposed to include both Rousseau and Goethe. If literary generations or cohorts are to have any meaning at all, then Rousseau's dates (1712-78) make it difficult to include him with much legitimacy among the Romantics, despite the exigencies of undergraduate survey courses. At best, he might be included among those precursors to Romanticism, the much-debated pre-Romantics. Goethe, on the other hand, lived to see the dominance of the Romantics, but never made more than a grudging peace with some of them. It is a persistent quirk of Anglo-American reception of Goethe to lump him in with his Romantic contemporaries. While that simplifies procedures, it loses sight of the fact that Goethe was bom in 1749 and remained loyal to the ideals of the Enlightenment in which he grew up. Stelzig admits that his original plan had been to treat Wordsworth as well, but the only undisputed Romantic had to be excised for reasons of space.
Further, one is not surprised that Stelzig is unable to get a firm grasp on the slippery "Romantic autobiography." His ingenuous declaration rather begs the question: "I use the term Romantic autobiography, then, to denote a type of lifewriting the most prominent instances of which are The Confessions, Poetry ana...