Faust

Walter Arndt’s new translation of Faust reproduces not only the sense of the German original, but also Goethe’s enormously various metrics and rhyme schemes. This edition includes Parts I and II complete.

The backgrounds to Goethe’s Faust include the medieval Chapbook, the puppet play, and a surviving fragment of G. E. Lessing’s Faust play. The author’s plans and sketches, and a rich selection of his letters and comments to Eckermann, trace Goethe’s lifelong involvement in the work, as does an analytical table showing the phases of composition. The “Contemporary Reactions” show how rapidly Faust came to be seen as a quintessential expression of German Romantic consciousness. The materials therein are by A. W. and F. Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Mme. de Stael, and Heinrich Heine; most have been newly translated for this Norton Critical Edition.

The essays in criticism have been chosen to help readers perceive and understand Faust’s extraordinary thematic and formal complexity. Hermann Weigand comments on Faust as a whole; Hans Mayer, on the backgrounds; Eudo C. Mason and Emil Staiger, on Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles; Barker Fairley and Georg Lukacs, on the Gretchen tragedy; L.A. Willoughby, Harold Jantz, and Wolfgang Binder, on the dramatic structure of Faust; and Wilhelm Emrich, Herman Meyer, and Hans Eichner, on the special difficulties of Faust, Part II. Several of these selections are also newly translated into English.