The novel poetics of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

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This work examines four Goethe novels, showing that, while they are all concerned with the process of constructing and reading literary texts, this tendency reaches its culmination in the Wanderjahre. Here Goethe presents a new form of novel in which practice fuses with theory and the literary work is itself simultaneously a discourse on the construction and interpretation of works of art. The Wanderjahre represents within Goethe's own narrative work a development toward a new post-classical theory of the novel.