Complete Works 1-2: My Life. A Walk to Syracuse in the Year 1802

Seume, Johann Gottfried, 1763-1810Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
1.1M words
Chapters
111

Tags

Foreign Language Books General BiographyTravel Grand TourTravel LiteratureSocial ObservationEnlightenment ThoughtMemoirAutobiographyItalian Setting

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Sämmtliche Werke 1-2: Mein Leben / Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802 by SeumeAuthor: Seume, Johann Gottfried, 1763-1810,Language: German, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Sep 11, 2015

Editor's review

This collection contains two major works by Johann Gottfried Seume: the autobiography Mein Leben and the travel account Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802. A leading German Enlightenment thinker and travel writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Seume writes with directness and close observation, offering both candid recollections of his own life and vivid records of the society he encountered along the way. His walk through Italy still feels immediate today; his descriptions of villages, towns, and people are unadorned and all the more credible for it. As a German public-domain Project Gutenberg book, the text follows the original printing without modern annotation, making it suitable for readers with German reading ability and an interest in Enlightenment travel literature and social history. Reading the autobiography alongside the travel account reveals how the same person's tone shifts between genres.

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Reading tips

  1. Read Mein Leben first to understand the author's life, then move on to the Sicilian travelogue for smoother comprehension.
  2. Look up place names as you read the travelogue to build a sense of the route and avoid getting lost in old toponyms.
  3. Compare the descriptions of towns and countryside with contemporary sources and take thematic notes.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is there a modern Chinese translation of this book? The listing indicates this is a German-language public-domain Project Gutenberg e-book and gives no information about Chinese translations. If German is difficult, first check libraries or databases for Chinese translations of Seume's works before deciding to read the original.
Are both works included in full or excerpted? The title identifies the book as volumes 1–2 of the complete works, containing Mein Leben and Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802. The Gutenberg edition is based on public-domain texts; check the actual e-book contents for completeness and verify against the table of contents after downloading.
What historical background is needed to read this book? Familiarity with the German Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the state of Europe after the French Revolution, and Italy's cultural standing in the eyes of travelers at the time will clearly help. It is still readable without this background, but you will need to look things up as you go.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Seume, Johann Gottfried, 1763-1810 Author · German · 1763–1810

Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810) was a German writer and poet, known for travel writings such as A Walk to Syracuse and for autobiographical works. His best-known work, A Walk to Syracuse in 1802, records his journey on foot from Germany to Sicily and combines travel observation with commentary on social realities, making it a distinctive contribution to German travel literature. The first two volumes of his Collected Works include My Life and other autobiographical writings, reflecting his personal experience and the spirit of his time. The library also holds The Voyage of the First Hessian Army from Portsmouth to New York, 1776, a documentary work connected with the Hessian troops during the American Revolutionary War. Public information is limited; his writing centers on travel, autobiography, and contemporary observation, in a plain style with a critical awareness, and holds a place in the German traditions of travel literature and autobiography.