Mignon's AfterlivesCrossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This book traces the fortunes of the character Mignon, from Goethe’s 1796 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Mignon corpus includes novels, stories, poems, plays, songs, operas, films, and images, and ranges from high-culture or canonic works to popular representations. These materials are displayed in the central chapters of the book as an ‘exhibition’, a historical repertory of instances from German, French, and English culture respectively; a further chapter charts Mignon’s musical manifestations in their relation to literature, and addresses the broader question of the status of song within fiction (fictional song). This set of cultural histories is inserted into the methodological, thematic, and analytic framework provided by the opening and concluding chapters. The key issues that emerge include the status of the corpus itself as an object and vehicle of knowledge, its constitution as a set of family resemblances, and its relation to history and cultural memory; the cross-cultural nature of the corpus, and in particular the suspicion of sentimentality that hangs over it; the concept of cultural translation as intrinsic to Mignon’s story and its trajectories; the cultural-historical sense of her positioning at a threshold between child and adult, female and male, aphasic and expressive, feral and aesthetically sensitive; and finally the cognitive value of the corpus, both historically and critically, as a vehicle and instrument of thought: thinking with Mignon thus becomes the symbolic catchword for the book as a whole.

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