Models of Wholeness

This volume assembles thirteen essays by two of the greatest British Germanists, Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby. The essays are presented chronologically from 1942 to 1969 and offer extraordinary insights into Goethe’s works and Schiller’s aesthetics. They demonstrate the ways in which and the extent to which Wilkinson and Willoughby in their thirty-five years of collaboration reshaped the study of Goethe and Schiller in the United Kingdom with their combination of critical intelligence, historical awareness and literary panache. These essays are fresh and immediate – not simply because Wilkinson and Willoughby wrote so well, but also because their arguments have much to contribute to literary studies in the present Age of Theory. By their analyses they show how Goethe and Schiller provide us with intellectual models and an understanding of the importance of art for life. ‘Wholeness’ is the key concept which permeates these essays; it is testimony to what criticism can achieve when the whole man and the whole woman act in unison.

The Authors: Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson, FBA, was Professor of German at University College London from 1961 to 1976. Leonard Ashley Willoughby was Professor of German at University College London from 1931 to 1950. Both were awarded the Goethe-Medaille in Gold of the Goethe Institut and honours from many European and American Universities. Their collaborative work on Goethe and Schiller, particularly on the aesthetic theories and the literary practice, which began in the 1940s and continued until Willoughby’s death in 1977, was one of the great glories of German Studies in the United Kingdom.