Literature and the cult of personality

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The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon stemmed from a cult of personality central to nineteenth-century cultural politics. This work reconstructs the culture wars surrounding Goethe’s authority, revealing a hidden chapter in intellectual history from the late eighteenth century to the dawn of Modernism. It highlights the roles of both marginal and canonical writers and critics, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe became an empowering cultural platform that challenged the notion of British literature's self-sufficiency. Engaging with German authors through translation and review offered literary enfranchisement and a model of development where 're-writers' evolved into original writers via an apprenticeship in translation. The critical writings examined reveal that textual analysis plays a minor role; instead, a robust cult of personality emerges, alongside a framework for hero-worship ideology that is more thoroughly explored in the cultural and political landscape of twentieth-century Europe.