The Englishman

Jakob Michael Reinhold LenzProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.0

Word count: 38K words
Chapters: 4

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.Der Engländer by Jakob Michael Reinhold LenzAuthor: Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 1751-1792,Language: German, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Nov 1, 2004

Editor's review

Der Engländer is a play by the eighteenth-century German writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, belonging to the Sturm und Drang current in German literature. The work revolves around the arrival of an Englishman and the conflicts it provokes, and has a pronounced period polemical character: the characters’ speeches are intense, and the plot advances through dialogue and clashes of ideas, reading more like a social debate about identity, manners, and morality. Its value lies not in offering tidy answers but in preserving a period’s imagining of and arguments about the figure of “the Englishman” and its own cultural situation. It is suited to readers interested in German literary history, eighteenth-century drama, and the Sturm und Drang movement, and can serve as a textual sample for understanding Lenz’s style and period context. Readers need patience with the dramatic form and argumentative dialogue.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying German literary history and following the Sturm und Drang movement
Readers researching eighteenth-century drama and character debate
Chinese readers who wish to understand Lenz’s dramatic style
Readers who can accept dialogue-dense texts built on clashes of ideas

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting light stories or strong entertainment value in plot
Readers unaccustomed to dramatic dialogue and argumentative texts
Complete beginners with no German who need to read the original closely line by line

Reading tips

Learn the basic tenets of Sturm und Drang first before entering the text; this makes the direction of the characters’ speeches easier to grasp.
Read scene by scene and note relationships and shifts in position among characters so that dense dialogue does not confuse the threads.
Use the figure of “the Englishman” as an entry point into period cultural imagination, organizing what the author is arguing about as you read.
After finishing, compare with common themes in German drama of the same period to judge the play’s distinctiveness and limitations.

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.

FAQ

What genre is this work?

It is a dramatic work in which character dialogue drives both plot and clashes of ideas. Reading requires following characters’ positions scene by scene rather than expecting the continuous narration of a novel.

Can I read it without knowing about Sturm und Drang?

You can, but prior knowledge of the movement’s emphasis on emotion and rebellion against established norms makes it easier to understand the intensity of the characters’ speeches and the focus of the debate, reducing the sense of estrangement while reading.

Why is the book titled Der Engländer?

The title points to an English character in the play and the cultural collision he brings. The work uses this figure to open discussion of manners, identity, and morality; its specific meaning must be understood through the characters’ dialogue and the course of the conflict.

Comments

Find this book

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

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz Author · German · 1751–1792

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792) was a leading writer of the German Sturm und Drang movement, born in Livonia (present-day Latvia). He maintained close ties with Goethe and Herder, and his major works, Der Hofmeister and Die Soldaten, break free from the constraints of the dramatic unities, exposing social injustice in a realistic vein and anticipating naturalism and expressionism. Seven of his works are held in this collection, including the two plays above, a polemical defense of Wieland, the novel Der Waldbruder written as a counterpart to Werther, and Der Engländer, Der Landprediger and Zerbin, oder die neuere Philosophie. After 1778 he suffered from mental illness and died in poverty in Moscow; public information on his life is limited, while his works, often centering on lower-class figures, are passionate and direct in style.