The Worth of Werther: Goethe's Literary Marketing

Abstract

Werther was the first work of German literature to become something like a brand name. It seemed that a new era had begun for the sympathetic reader in the second half of the eighteenth century. The discourse of sensibility presented the world as an effusion of the self, as a space in which the subject could be constructed as the receptacle of its own imaginary projections reflected by the objects around it. The vogue of sensibility prepared literary culture for the emergence of a cult of subjectivity. Werther gave it a name. In turn, the illustrations of the novel's most memorable scenes gave Lotte and Werther a face. They became an integral part of the book's spectacular success and were indeed the object of the intense competition between the authorized publisher Weygand and the numerous pirates that reprinted the text along with new illustra-