Il Cielo e la terra nelle Sieben Legenden di Gottfried Keller

Abstract

During his staying in Berlin in the fifties, Keller reads the legends written by Ludwig Theoboul Kosegarten which praise Christian privation and sacrifice. Inspired by Feuerbach’s philosophy on the essence of religion, Keller retells some of the tales. But he tranforms them into a non religious and erotic form and refunctions the original trascendental orientation of the tales into the concerns of nature and real world. The present work analyses the new legends by Keller —three medieval tales of the Virgin Mary and four conversion stories— and underlines the irony as well as the message of a new earthly religion