Name: The Metamorphosis of Plants
SKU: 56850064
Price: 381.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Type

Physical Book

Author

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Publisher

MIT Press

Language

English

Pages

156

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9780262551021

Synopsis "The Metamorphosis of Plants"

Goethe's influential text, newly illustrated with stunning color photographs. The Metamorphosis of Plants, published in 1790, was Goethe's first major attempt to describe what he called in a letter to a friend "the truth about the how of the organism." Inspired by the diversity of flora he found on a journey to Italy, Goethe sought a unity of form in diverse structures. He came to see in the leaf the germ of a plant's metamorphosis--"the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all vegetal forms"--from the root and stem leaves to the calyx and corolla, to pistil and stamens. With this short book--123 numbered paragraphs, in the manner of the great botanist Linnaeus--Goethe aimed to tell the story of botanical forms in process, to present, in effect, a motion picture of the metamorphosis of plants. This MIT Press edition of The Metamorphosis of Plants illustrates Goethe's text (in an English translation by Douglas Miller) with a series of stunning and starkly beautiful color photographs as well as numerous line drawings. It is the most completely and colorfully illustrated edition of Goethe's book ever published. It demonstrates vividly Goethe's ideas of transformation and interdependence, as well as the systematic use of imagination in scientific research--which influenced thinkers ranging from Darwin to Thoreau and has much to teach us today about our relationship with nature.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

(Author)

View Author's Page

Poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, and German politician. At the University of Strasbourg, he met Herder, who introduced him to the works of Shakespeare and whom he later helped to create the German Romantic movement Sturm und Drang. In 1775, Charles Augustus, heir to the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, invited Goethe to live and work in Weimar, which was then one of the intellectual and literary centers of Germany. There, he developed a brilliant political career which he eventually abandoned to dedicate himself to traveling and writing. He is one of the greatest literary exponents of Romanticism and for many the most important writer in German literature.

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