ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some key aspects of the reception of Faust I in British literary culture during the Romantic period. It illustrates how Germaine de Stael constructed such a reading of Faust I, focused on the significance of Mephistopheles. The chapter traces the influence of her ideas through reviews and translations of Faust I in English, during George Gordon Byron's and Percy Bysshe Shelley's lifetimes, including some translations of the play that they both knew. The series of reviews and translations of Faust I that followed De l'Allemagne turned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's text into a site of contest over notions of literary, moral, and religious propriety, notions which of course had definite political resonances. Although Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself saw poetry as the highest form of human expression, unlike Friedrich Schlegel he sought to preserve the distinctions between literature, philosophy, and theology that Goethe's art had broken down.
