C. M. Wieland's profession of love: Lecture and language
Description
The German literary craftsman Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) was a great spokesman for the eighteenth century, not least in the compulsion to discourse on erotic love, combining observation with a rhetoric of allusion and metaphor. Erotic love dominated Wieland's earlier prose and poetry. Idealized and rather seraphic in the beginning, it seemed to change radically after 1760. Wieland was then often accused of appealing to prurient interests and was ultimately branded undeutsch, unchristlich and unsittlich Modern scholarship largely discounts the charges of immorality leveled against Wieland. A concensus remains, however, that the poet's approach to love and virtue changed considerably with experience. This view, supported in part by the poet's own declaration that he experienced a great personal metamorphosis toward 1760, is challenged in the study at hand, which--building on contributions by Gruber, Hoppe, Sengle, Seiffert, Paulsen, McCarthy and others--compares Wieland's portrayal of erotic experience during his controversial years 1750-1780, before and after his 'great transformation.' In Part One, Chapters I and II chronicle Wieland's life to 1780, focusing on the relationship between his writing and women, and on factors significant in his perception of love. In Part Two, Chapter III traces the early history of Wieland's eroticism and of critical reaction to the poet's depiction of love, and reviews briefly previous scholarly analyses of Wieland's erotic writings. Chapter IV examines vocabulary, style and content of works written by Wieland in the 1750's in which the erotic is a significant factor, as compared to selected works written in the 1760's and 1770's, after Wieland's 'metamorphosis.' True to the Horatian dictum, Wieland's primary concern was to convey lessons in esthetically pleasing form. His lessons were in love. After his 'great transformation,' he believed the best way to entertain and edify was through humor. The elements of Wieland's Liebeslehre, however, remained essentially unchanged, as did the vocabulary he employed to describe the love encounter. Indeed, in his metaphor, Wieland was more erotic as a 'Platonic enthusiast' and 'seraphic poet' in the 1750's, than he was later when censured by many as an advocate of sexual license