Miss Sara Sampson

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1729-1781Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.7

Word count: 168K words
Chapters: 17

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.Miss Sara Sampson by Gotthold Ephraim LessingAuthor: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1729-1781,Language: German, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Oct 1, 2005

Editor's review

Miss Sara Sampson is an important early bourgeois tragedy by Lessing and a turning point in the history of German drama. It shifts tragedy's protagonist from princes and nobles to an ordinary bourgeois family and drives the plot through emotional conflict and moral dilemma, letting the audience experience Enlightenment thinking on human nature and morality through the tension between family ethics and personal feeling. As a public-domain ebook, this edition allows researchers and literature lovers to read the German original directly and is well suited to observing changes in subject matter and form in eighteenth-century German drama. Readers interested in Western drama history, Enlightenment literature, or German study can use it as an entry point to the rise of bourgeois tragedy; those seeking light storytelling should adjust their expectations, as the language and dramatic structure bear clear marks of their era.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Literature students studying German Enlightenment literature and bourgeois tragedy
Readers who want to understand eighteenth-century German drama through the original text
Drama enthusiasts interested in works from turning points in Western theater history
Learners who need the German original for close reading or translation practice

Not a good fit for

General readers who only want light, entertaining stories
Readers unfamiliar with German who are unwilling to use a translation or notes
Drama readers expecting modern pacing and strong plot conflict

Reading tips

Read an introduction to the background of bourgeois tragedy before entering the play itself to understand its place in theater history.
Read act by act, noting the moral conflicts and emotional turns in the characters' dialogue.
German learners can compare with a Chinese translation or annotated edition and mark period vocabulary and sentence patterns.
After finishing, sort out the differences in the main characters' positions to help grasp Lessing's Enlightenment intent.

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

Is this book in German or English?

According to the information, the book's language is German and it is a German literary text. Readers with limited German reading ability can use a Chinese translation or related annotated materials to assist understanding.

Why is this play important in theater history?

It is often regarded as an early representative of German bourgeois tragedy, turning tragedy's focus to bourgeois family life and personal feeling and changing the earlier tradition of tragedy with aristocratic protagonists, with inspiring significance for later German drama.

Is this edition suitable for academic citation?

This is a public-domain electronic text provided by Project Gutenberg and can be used for general reading and research reference. For formal academic citation, it is advisable to check authoritative critical or publisher editions and note the source of the electronic text.

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

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1729-1781 Author

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–1781) was a major writer and critic of the German Enlightenment, whose work spanned drama, aesthetic theory, and literary criticism. The library holds 24 of his works, including the aesthetic treatise Laokoon: Or, On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry, which examines the differences between the media of the visual arts and poetry; the plays Minna von Barnhelm and Emilia Galotti; and the verse drama Nathan the Wise, whose subjects range from bourgeois life and moral conflict to religious tolerance. His style is clear and incisive, and he advances ideas through dialogue and argument; his influence on German drama and aesthetics has been profound. Public information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here.