Reconsiders the role played by mimesis - and by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister as a mimetic work - in the novels of Early German Romanticism. Mimesis, or the imitation of nature, is one of the most important concepts in eighteenth-century German literary aesthetics. As the century progressed, classical mimeticism came increasingly under attack, though it also held its position in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Moritz. Much recent scholarship...