Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Heine, Heinrich (Vol. 54) - Robert C. Holub (essay date 1988)

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Robert C. Holub (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: "Heine and Utopia," in Heine-Jahrbuch, Vol. 27, 1988, pp. 86-112.

[In the following essay, Holub claims that Utopian concerns are not central to Heine's writings, despite claims to the contrary by many contemporary critics of Heine, and that Heine instead expresses a realistic political agenda.]

So pflegen immer große Poeten zu verfahren:

sie begründen zugleich etwas Neues, indem sie das Alte

zerstören; sie negieren nie, ohne etwas zu bejahen.

(Heine: Einleitung zu Don Quixote)

It is almost certain that Heine would have protested against the application of the label, "utopian" to his thought or works. For in his day the word had largely pejorative connotations. No longer associated solely with Thomas More's epoch-making work, "utopia" was nonetheless still clearly identified with models of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jocelyne Kolb (essay date 1981)
   2. S. S. Prawer (essay date 1983)
   3. Robert C. Holub (essay date 1988)
   4. Russell A. Berman (essay date 1988)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright