Lanterna Rally

Author: Timothy Fairfax Pope

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780773526051

J.M.R. Lenz is remembered as the most creative and original of Goethe's Strasbourg friends and, because of failures in his personal life, as a figure of pathos. The son of a Lutheran pastor who received a theological education at the university of Koenigsberg, Lenz was a religious thinker who saw himself as prophet as well as poet. Timothy Pope's Holy Fool is the first study of Lenz to consider how Christian faith shaped his literary theory and practice and was responsible for his unwise expectations about the increasingly secular world for which he wrote. phenomenon that was linked to the temporary lapses into insanity that he experienced after he was banished, at Goethe's insistence, from the court and city of Weimar. Pope reveals, however, that a dynamic shift in Lenz's faith had occurred four years before the debacle of Weimar. Coherent statements during those four years concerning the articles of his new faith, and a consistent application of faith to questions of poetry and dramatic theory, indicate that Lenz's contribution to the literary revolution of the 1770s was conditioned as much by a personal religious renewal as by enthusiasm for the aims and ideals of his generation. Theologically, Lenz's new convictions followed a path that led away from the neology of the late Enlightenment and pointed not only back to conservative traditions but also forward to the Christology of more modern times.