Mignon's Afterlives

By tracing the afterlives of Mignon, an apparently minor character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Terence Cave explores a phenomenal success story in the history of literature and music, and more broadly of cultural history. Mignon steps out of the shadow of its protagonist Wilhelm and fashions a destiny of her own: she becomes the object of an obsessive interest that reached its peak in the later nineteenth century but continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century. Mignon reappears - often as a character bearing a different name but sharing an unmistakable family resemblance with her - in a wide range of different literary works from Goethe himself via the German Romantic Novel, Mme de Stael, George Sand, Nerval and Baudelaire, Walter Scott and George Eliot to Gerhart Hauptmann and Angela Carter. Her songs, set by dozens of composers from Reichardt and Beethoven to Wolf, reverberated through the drawing-rooms and concert-halls of nineteenth-century Europe. She is the heroine of the most popular French opera of the late nineteenth century, and she has featured in a number of films. She is fascinating because she is poised on the threshold between childhood and adolescence, aphasia and expressive power, words and music; she is a wanderer who has lost her home, an exile who has been abducted and abused; and the many stories in which her life is reenacted provide a litmus test for key cultural values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

ISBN 0199604800   Pages 328 ISBN13 9780199604807 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 666 Publisher Oxford University Press   Published in Oxford Imprint Oxford University Press   Height (mm) 236 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 160 Publication date 22 Sep 2011   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY 809.894   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS; PREFACE; INTRODUCTION; 1. The Mignon corpus: preliminary considerations; 2. Mignon in Germany: from Goethe to Stifter; 3. Nineteenth-century French afterlives; 4. Nineteenth-century English afterlives; 5. Mignon's modern and postmodern survivals; 6. Mignon's songs: making music out of fiction; 7. The Mignon corpus: a synoptic view; Conclusion: a future for Mignon; Appendix I: The songs of Mignon and Philine; Appendix II: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: principal episodes; Appendix III: Mignon in Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung; Appendix IV: A Mignon chronology; List of works cited; Index

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