ABSTRACT
Devlin-Glass, Frances, editor, The Annotated Such Is Life, Oxford, Melbourne, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991
Franklin, Miles (in association with Kate Baker), Joseph Furphy: The Legend of a Man and His Book, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1944
White, R.S., Furphy's Shakespeare, Perth: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, 1989
Wilkes, G.A., Joseph Furphy's "Such Is Life," Melbourne: Shillington House, 1985
Published anonymously, The Sufferings of Young Werther immediately became an international best-seller and is still, despite the greater renown of his Faust, Goethe's most frequently printed and translated work. In Germany, where Goethe was already a rising star and the novel's authorship no secret, its biographical and autobiographical elements were quickly identified and adduced in criticism of it; elsewhere it aroused curiosity about its author and its genesis that marked the beginning of Goethe's worldwide fame. Countless readers have recognized in Werther's thoughts and feelings aspects of their own experience (see Barthes, 1977): contemporaries discussed Werther as if he were an actual person, praising his virtues, condemning his insufficiencies, and scrutinizing his character and motives with passionate interest, and in the never diminishing spate of critical discussions of the novel until now the psychological complexity of its protagonist is always a central theme.
