Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2020
Summary
I have sought in this study to establish the unity of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years upon a foundation of Comic form. The unity of these two novels taken together consists not, however, in mere uniformity: thus, no simple and static notion of Comic form would have been adequate to shed light upon their underlying structure. The interpretive task at hand required a notion of Comic form as dynamic and internally differentiated as the complex narrative it sought to elucidate. Northrop Frye’s subtle morphology of Comic form, in which Comedy as a pregeneric modality is seen as a continuous evolution of structure modulating through Satiric-Ironic, pure Comic, and Romance “tonalities” proves uniquely capable of uncovering the unity within Goethe’s richly diverse narrative.
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- Goethe and the Myth of the BildungsromanRethinking the <I>Wilhelm Meister</I> Novels, pp. 135 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020