"This is the first book-length study that examines how literary narcissism in the Age of Goethe intersects with concepts of creativity, language, gender, and national identity, and how major German writers of this period anticipate the formation of what today is recognized as the Freudian concept of narcissism" "The study shows that the narcissistic scenario was particularly attractive to eighteenth-century authors because it could both capture and conceal the contradictions inherent in enlightenment thinking."

"The analyses of poems, narratives, dramas, and critical texts by Moritz, Schiller, Herder, Tieck, Goethe, Lavater, and others shed new light on how progress in the medical, philosophical, and anthropological discourses of the time converge with aesthetic and literary considerations." "The volume illustrates how aspects of Freud's psychology have grown out of notions of subjectivity not confined to the Victorian age, as is often assumed, but with roots in the contradicting values of bourgeois emancipation."--Jacket.