biography
| name: |
Bodmer, Johann Jakob
|
pronunciation:
[botmair]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1698–1783)
|
| biography:
| Writer and literary theorist, born in Greifensee, near Zürich, N Switzerland. An associate of Goethe, Klopstock, and Wieland, his critical and aesthetic writings significantly shaped literary theory in the 18th-c. Together with his friend Johann Breitinger, with whom he founded the periodical Discourse der Mahlern (1721–3), he opposed the rigidities of Gottsched's interpretation of the French classical ideal, stressing instead the primacy of creative fantasy and the significance of the miraculous in literature, as well as championing the work of Milton. His best-known treatise is Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740). |
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