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Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (in German, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) is the second novel by Goethe, published in 1795. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization. The story centers upon Wilhelm's attempt to escape what he views as the empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theater, Wilhelm commits himself to a mysterious Tower Society comprising enlightened aristocrats.
Further books patterned after this novel have been called Bildungsromane ("novels of formation"), despite the fact that Wilhelm's "Bildung" is ironized by the narrator at many points.[1]
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre ("Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years"), the sequel, was Goethe's fourth and last novel. Its first edition appeared in 1828, and substantially reworked second edition in 1829.
The opera Mignon by Ambroise Thomas is based on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
- ^ See: Sammons, Jeffrey L. "The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman; or, What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?" Genre 14 (1981): 229-46.
