Geschichte des Agathon, Teil 2

Christoph Martin Wieland's landmark novel follows Agathon, a young Greek who flees his insular religious community to discover the world and himself. Part 2 continues his extraordinary journey through philosophy, love, power, and moral reckoning, as the idealist who once believed in perfect virtue confronts the messy complexity of actual human existence. Wieland pioneered a radical idea: that interior life, the silent drama of a mind grappling with desire and reason, deserves its own literary territory. This expanded 1794 edition represents the culmination of his revolutionary approach to narrative. The novel anticipates everything later novelists would discover about psychological depth, making it the unlikely ancestor of works by Goethe, Joyce, and Woolf. For readers interested in where the modern mind came from, this is ground zero.