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Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman. By Tobias Boes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. x + 201 pages. $21.00

(45). She makes thought-provoking statements in constructing a new hierarchy of colors but does not always take into account the complexity of Goethe’s own diverse comments on this issue and his development of thinking from the early Farbenlehre, a work on optics initiated by his critique of Newton, up to the late works including Chromatik, and Goethe’s final discovery that turbidity (Trübe) is actually at the core of color formation (on this see Allert in Goethe Yearbook 19 [2012]: 29–47). Currie’s fifth chapter, “ ‘Harmoniespiel der Farben’: Goethe, Meyer and Pietro da Cortona,” shows Goethe’s close interaction with painters and art theorists of his time and his enormous impact on art itself. It includes photographs of frescos and paintings that are exquisite. She applies Heinrich Wölfflin’s distinction between “linear” and “painterly” styles and offers fascinating new insights to chiaroscuro painting or “Helldunkelmalerei.” In her sixth chapter, “Classical Colour Harmony: Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Jacques Louis David and his Pupil Gottlieb Schick, an ‘emporstrebenden jungen Maler’ in Rome,” she seems to notice an interesting cognitive shift from the Classical to the Romantic paradigm, even in Goethe’s own work. The seventh chapter deals further with Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on harmony through color variation and the eighth chapter concludes the volume by posing the radical question: “An Alternative Antiquity? Ornament in Goethe, Meyer and Liulio Romano.” In sum, Currie is daring in her claim that Goethe’s works anticipate key insights of much later theorists on the visual and on perception. She finds that Goethe connects even with the painter Turner and his approach to physiological colors. She uses insights by Ralph D. Ellis on Gestalt shifts and deals with famous visual theorists today, including W.J.T. Mitchell, on ambiguous figures that are interpreted “as a device for educating self-knowledge, a kind of mirror for the beholder, or a screen of selfprojection like the Rorschach-test” (21). Currie does not approach Goethe’s work primarily through the lens of recent theory in her innovative readings of Goethe, although her book makes many such references; rather, she claims to extricate theoretical elements she finds already implicit in Goethe’s creative and critical work. She shows how Goethe challenges and contributes to visual and art-theoretical debates then and even now and suggests a reevaluation of the Symbolic while incorporating ideas by Goethe into a new reading of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Zur Farbenlehre, and Goethe’s review of J.E. Purkinje’s “Das Sehen in subjektiver Hinsicht” (1824). This volume is a marvelous study of how Goethe participated in perception theory, physics, cognition studies, and psychology. Currie’s work is a significant step toward uncovering and clarifying some of the mental images and cognitive elements that are already critically reflected in Goethe’s perceptive writings.