· 1774 · Enlightenment
Werther
The young man of Goethe's novel who reads too much, loves a woman who does not love him back, and kills himself, in a book that made that behaviour fashionable across Europe for a decade.
The prototype of the reader who goes looking for a character in order to feel something, and then brings the feeling home. Published in 1774; within two years the resulting condition had a name, Wertherfieber, and ministers of religion were issuing warnings about it.
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