Laocoon / Lessing Herder Goethe / Selections (THE MORRIS U. SCHAPPES COPY)

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Burgundy (or, as the eBay sellers would have it, "burgandy") cloth with gilt titles still bright to spine. There are some margin notes to a few pages of the Introduction, all in the same small hand, though in several languages. Previous owner's name "Morris U. Schappes" in ink to front pastedown. Schappes (1907-2004), born Moishe ben Haim Shapshilevich in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine, was an American college professor, educator, writer, radical political activist, and historian, best remembered for his 1941 perjury conviction obtained in association with testimony before the Rapp-Coudert Committee investigating Communism in education in New York, and subsequently as the 40-year editor of the radical magazine Jewish Life (later Jewish Currents), an English-language organ of the Communist Party, USA, dealing with Jewish issues and targeted to a Jewish readership -- though after 1956 the magazine reportedly decided to leave the Communist Party orbit. (In his later years, Schappes garnered professional recognition for his work as an historian, and in 1993 he was awarded the Torchbearer Award of the American Jewish Historical Society.) Of the William Guild Howard / Henry Holt volume in hand, the 145-page introduction and the 137-page Commentary are in English, but the bulk of the text (Goethe's 15-page, 1798 essay "Uber Laocoon"; Herder's 1769, 125-page "Erstes kritisches Waldchen", and Lessing's 137-page, 1766 essay "Laocoon" and his 27-page "Entwurfe") are in German. All but the last named essay feature facsimile reproductions of their original title pages. "The purpose of this volume is to facilitate the approach to Lessing's 'Laokoon,' and to make the study of the questions treated by Lessing as instructive as possible," the author states in his Preface. "Accordingly, I have cleared away from the text sundry archaeological obstructions, which Lessing himself was ready to sacrifice in a second edition; I have modernized the language, have drawn upon Goethe and Herder for interpretation and criticism, and have set forth at some length the history of the problems. . . ." The Laocoön Group, estimated 27 B.C. to 68 A.D., depicting the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents, has been called "the prototypical icon of human agony" in Western art, and has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican, where it remains. Pliny attributed the work, then in the palace of Emperor Titus, to three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. clxviii Introduction in English, followed by 470 pp. mostly in German (Deutsch) but including substantial English-language Commentary and Bibliography. This book now reduced from $155. N° de ref. del artículo 005268

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