Elective Affinities (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Author), David Constantine (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0192837761 | ISBN-13: 978-0192837769 | Publication Date: March 1999

Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'as a study of marital relations and adultery it is strangely topical, with a pitiless psychological insight which is close to Laclos and the French school' Brian Fallon, Irish Times

'David Constantine has struck a readable tone that sets the novel in its time without pastiche. Thanks to the fluidity of Constantine's prose, Goethe's story succeeds .... in fascinating and moving us. Constantine has caught the crispness of Goethe's descriptive language. ' Albert Manguel, Observer

'... superbly translated' Nicholas Boyle Journal of European Studies, XXIV (1994)

About the Author

David Constantine is a Fellow in German at The Queen's College, Oxford. He is a poet (published by Bloodaxe) and translator as well as being an Oxford academic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192837761
• ISBN-13: 978-0192837769
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #897,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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