Julie or The New Heloise

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Title of the first edition

Julie or Die neue Heloise (French: Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse ) is a letter novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau , which was first published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The novel was one of the greatest fiction book successes of the 18th century and had at least 70 editions by the end of it.

title

The original title was letters from two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps . However, the novel became famous under the title Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse , which alludes to the love and suffering story of Heloisa and Peter Abelard .

action

Julie d'Étanges reads a letter from Saint-Preux. Drawing: Tony Johannot , engraving: Brugnot.
Saint-Preux ponders his love.

Just as Abelard once fell in love with her as Heloisa's private tutor, so the young bourgeois private tutor Saint-Preux falls in love with Julie d'Étanges, a girl from a noble family in Switzerland. He confesses his love to her in a letter, she writes to him in a way that he notices: she reciprocates. With the help of Julie's cousin, several affectionate encounters take place. Julie hopes to be pregnant and thus to be able to force marriage, but loses the child in a fall. Julie's father is outraged when he has to assume that the unsuitable Saint-Preux wants to marry his daughter. Saint-Preux has to part with Julie, who lives in Vevey , and goes to Paris. The lovers continue their correspondence, which is discovered by the mother. When the mother dies shortly afterwards, Julie is so filled with remorse that she agrees to marry a Herr von Wolmar, to whom her father owes his life. Returning from circumnavigating the world with Admiral Anson , Saint-Preux finds her lover as wife and mother. Love has not died out, but it has now become a threat to moral order. When one of the children falls into the water and threatens to drown, Julie jumps after it, saves it - but dies of the heated fever that the hypothermia has caused her. Her last letter reaches Saint-Preux when she is already dead.

theme

Saint-Preux says goodbye to Julie.

Rousseau contrasts natural perception with the absurd demands of society, which even in Switzerland, where the nobility has apparently been abolished but still exists in patrician form, clings to class prejudice. The book is a flaming plea for love marriage and against the arrogance of the aristocracy, for the absoluteness and authenticity of subjective feeling. At the same time, it is a fictional-disguised crossroads of all the topics that occupy him: from the primacy of Italian music to French, from the correct self-sufficient economic management using the example of a small Swiss winery, from the correct upbringing, from the segregation of the sexes, from the correct belief in one of the confessional Encouragements purged God from the legitimacy of suicide, from a morality and politics based exclusively on the common good and virtue.

particularities

The book was put on the index in 1806 .

Impact history

The most important forerunners of the book are likely to be Samuel Richardson's epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa . Robert Darnton suspects that The New Heloise "was perhaps the greatest bestseller of the century". Their success was so immense that the booksellers, because the new editions did not follow suit, started to borrow the book by the day, even by the hour. Many readers could not believe that it was a fiction and wrote to Rousseau to learn more about the protagonists. Rousseau's portrayals of nature in connection with tender love found a worthy successor in Goethe's Werther only thirteen years later. The fulminance with which Rousseau attacked prejudice of class here may have done more for the French Revolution than his contrat social . The fashion triggered by the novel of hiking and seeking relaxation in Switzerland was not only reflected in Goethe's trip to Switzerland, but decades later in a trivial novel like Claurens Mimili .

Julie saves her son Marcellin, who has fallen into the water - the cause of a fever from which she dies soon after. Part 6, 9th letter from Fanchon to Saint Preux

criticism

  • The “Nouvelle Héloise” has now moved us further as a complete work; we can no longer immediately feel the force with which it seized and shook the century of Rousseau. Their purely artistic weaknesses are clear to us. Time and again, the pure representation and the direct expression of feeling are held back by the doctrinal tendency under which the work is from the beginning. This tendency eventually becomes so strong that it completely crushes the work of art; the second part of the novel is almost exclusively moral and didactic. And already in the first part, the tension between the two basic motifs from which the work grew is unmistakable. In the midst of the most glowing and truest description of passion, the tone of abstract teaching becomes audible (...) And yet none of this can inhibit the elementary violence of the new feeling that is breaking through here. In individual images and scenes of the novel - as in that farewell scene when St. Preux, forced to leave his beloved and seized by the anticipation of eternal separation, sinks down on the steps of the stairs that he has just descended and with streaming tears covering the cold stone with his kisses - you can immediately feel the breath of a new era. Here a new form of poetry arises: here Goethe's Werther rises before us. Ernst Cassirer : The Problem Jean Jacques Rousseau (1932)

German-language editions

  • Julie or The New Heloise. Letters from two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps. Translated by JG Gellius u. a., Leipzig 1761 (improved new edition 1776).
  • (Author's first name Germanized) Frankfurt 1802.
  • Julie or the new Heloise. Letters from two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps. Translated from JP Le Pique - First Part, Geroldsche, Frankfurt 1810.
  • The new Heloise. Julie. German by Gustav Julius . Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1843 (1859. Both parts in 1 volume). (3rd edition 1877)
  • Julie or The New Heloise in Letters from Two Lovers. Translated by Hermann Denhardt. Volume 1. Reclam, Leipzig 1880 a. ö. Reclams Universal Library 1361; Volume 2, ca.1890
  • Julie or The New Heloise in 2 volumes. Reclam, Leipzig 1910
  • The new Heloise, ed. Curt Moreck , Gustav Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1920; Pantheon, Berlin 1920; again Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1980
  • Julie or The New Heloise. Letters from two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps. Illustrated with woodcuts after Tony Johannot / E. Wattier / E. Lepoitevin u. a. Based on the translation by Th. Hell . In Propylaen-Verlag / Berlin undated [1922] (two volumes; cover and print arrangement by Hugo Steiner-Prag )
  • Julie or The New Heloise. Based on the translation from 1776. Series: Winkler Weltliteratur-Dünndruck. Artemis & Winkler , Munich 1978; again dtv 2191 , Munich 1988 ISBN 3423021918 ; again Winkler, 2003 ISBN 3538052816
  • Julie or The New Heloise. Summary by Felix Braun. Weltbild Verlag , Augsburg 2005. Series: Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur, o. No .; ISBN 3828979254

literature

sorted alphabetically by author

  • Santo L. Aricò: Rousseau's Art of persuasion in La Nouvelle Héloïse , University Press of America, Lanham 1994 ISBN 9780819196187 .
  • Nouchine Behbahani: Paysages rêvés, paysages vécus dans La Nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau , Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, Oxford 1989 ISBN 9780729403931 .
  • L'Amour dans la nouvelle Héloïse: texte et intertexte: actes du colloque de Genève, 10-11–12 June 1999 , Ed . Jacques Berchtold, François Rosset, Droz, Genève 2002 ISBN 9782600008082 .
  • Jean-Marie Carzou: La Conception de la nature humaine dans la Nouvelle Héloïse , Sauret, Paris 1966.
  • Charles Dédéyan: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la Nouvelle Héloïse, ou, l'éternel retour , Nizet, Saint-Genouph 2002 ISBN 2-7078-1269-2 .
  • Charles Dédéyan: La Nouvelle Héloïse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: étude d'ensemble , SEDES-CDU, Paris 1990 ISBN 9782718127811 .
  • Jean Firges : Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Julie or The New Héloïse. The genesis of bourgeois ideology. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2005 ISBN 3933264367 (Exemplary series Literature & Philosophy, 18)
  • Maurice R Funke: From saint to psychotic: the crisis of human identity in the late 18th century: a comparative study of "Clarissa", "La Nouvelle Héloise", "The sufferings of young Werther" , Lang, New York 1983 ISBN 9780820400013 .
  • James Fleming Jones: La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau and utopia , Droz, Genève 1977.
  • Peggy Kamuf: Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Héloïse , U of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1982 ISBN 9780803227057 .
  • François van Laere: Une lecture du temps dans la Nouvelle Héloïse , La Baconnière, Neuchâtel 1968.
  • Laurence Mall: Origines et retraites dans La nouvelle Héloïse , Lang, New York 1997 ISBN 9780820433493 .
  • William Mead: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ou le Romancier enchaîné; étude de la nouvelle Héloïse , Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1966.
  • Daniel Mornet: La Nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau; étude et analyze , Mellottée Paris 1929.
  • Ourida Mostefai: Lectures de La Nouvelle Héloïse , N. Amer. Assn. for the Study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ottawa 1993 ISBN 9780969313236 .
  • Perry Reisewitz: L'Illusion salutaire: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Nouvelle Héloïse" as an aesthetic continuation of the philosophical anthropology of the discours , Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 2000 ISBN 9783861431039 .
  • Andreas Schönle: Julie's garden in the Nouvelle Héloïse. Rouseau and the idea of ​​"improvement" in Russia around 1800 . In: Die Gartenkunst  25 (1/2013), pp. 113–122.
  • Yannick Séité: Du livre au lire: La nouvelle Héloïse, roman des lumières , Champion, Paris 2002 ISBN 9782745305176 .
  • Étienne Servais: Le Genre romanesque en France depuis l'apparition de la Nouvelle Héloïse jusqu'aux approches de la Révolution , M. Lamertin, Bruxelles 1922.
  • Anne Tilleul: La Vertu du beau: essai sur "La nouvelle Héloïse" , Humanitas nouvelle optique, Montréal 1989 ISBN 9782893960074 .

Web links

Wikisource: Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse  - sources and full texts (French)
Commons : Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse  - collection of images, videos and audio files

notes

  1. ^ Name of the author of "Johann Jacob Rousseau" Germanized
  2. ↑ Online, scan
  3. ↑ 533 p. - This edition is unabridged
  4. ↑ 495 pp.
  5. ↑ In a five-volume selection of works
  6. ↑ 1920 in a so-called luxury edition. 386 pages. The omission of the main title "Julie" is noticeable. Note in the book: "This summary was obtained by Felix Braun after a revised contemporary translation"; 3 S. Braun's afterword. Images after copper by Moreau le Jeune. Braun's interventions are considerable, both in scope (about two fifths are omitted) and in tendency. He writes in the afterword: ... has been revised from a poetic point of view. The intention of the publisher was to lift the pure romance novel out of all the overgrowth of philosophy, criticism of the times, morality, religion, art, pedagogy, genre painting , digressions of every kind, to present only the story of the lovers to the reader. Thereby ... also had to be qualitatively changed, ie the pathos, the sentiment, the theatricality reduced or omitted. These misalignments of meaning are of considerable importance for the reception in the German-speaking area, since most reprints, especially those in large editions, are based on Braun's version to this day. Any serious occupation, on the other hand, has to fall back on the unabridged versions, i.e. either the very early, still in Gothic script, the Hell edition mentioned below or the thin print editions of the 1980s
  7. ↑ With illustrations after coppers by Chodowiecki and Gravelot. 596 pages in 2 volumes. "Reprint with partial use of the German edition from 1761"
  8. ↑ text identical to Kiepenheuer 1920, 386 S. Ill. As 1920.
  9. ↑ Charles Emile Wattier (1800-1868).
  10. ^ Reprint "with partial use of the German edition from 1761". Completely. Undated, the years vary between 1920 and 1925. Misc. Bindings
  11. ↑ 911 pages. With 792 notes (pp. 833–871) and afterword (pp. 800–827) by Reinhold Wolff . The afterword is a detailed essay on the genesis and interpretation of the book. Complete text of the first German translation by Johann Gottfried Gellius, with twelve copper engravings for the first edition by Gottlieb Leberecht Crusius after Hubert-François Gravelot . Edited and supplemented according to Edition Rey, Amsterdam 1761. With a time table by Dietrich Leube. Also at: Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart undated (1980)
  12. ^ Afterword by Braun (such as Kiepenheuer 1920): pp. 439–447. Note: “The summary of the work after a revised contemporary translation was done by Felix Braun. The translation has been carefully modernized ”. The ISBN belongs to a whole series of books by fifty authors.