To coincide with the celebration of the 250th anniversary of his birth, this book presents in a single volume four of Goethe''s principal masterpieces, together with a small selection of his poems and letters'

This is Goethe's first novel, published in 1774. Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. Goethe upset the conventional literature of his day by having his hero propose suicide as a method by which anyone might end an intolerable misery. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published,...

A true fairy story is a work of art. At Michaelmas in 1795, a series of stories appeared, of which the concluding one was a fairy tale: The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

The tale tells of magical transformation--one that, when the time is at hand, can be experienced by anyone. The author of these stories was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the creation of his fairy tale would have far-reaching consequences.

This edition of Goethe's fairy tale arose from illustrator David Newbatt's inspiration to join Thomas Carlyle's English translation with a new series of pictures....

Theory of Colours (original German title Zur Farbenlehre) is a book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how these are perceived by humans. Published in 1810, it contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration. Goethe's book provides a catalogue of how colour is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases. Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic treatment of colour, as with the qualities of how...