The Sorrows of Young Wertheris the story, told in epistolary form, of a young man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman betrothed to another man.  Unable either to win her over or to subdue his feelings, Werther eventually commits suicide with pistols borrowed from her husband. While Goethe's novel may seem to be related more closely to the eighteenth-century cult of sentiment than to Romanticism, it was nonetheless a text whose radicality helped to make possible the enormous cultural change that Romanticism represented.  It is because of Werther, for instance, that the calm introspectiveness of Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker was able to transform itself into the brooding and volatile interiority of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.  The German Romantics much preferred other writings by Goethe, such as Wilhelm Meister and Faust, that emphasized an ongoing and restless process of self-development.   Indeed, Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed Wilhelm Meister one of the great landmarks of the age.  Yet it was essentially no longer necessary even to point to Werther.  For Werther--as the virtually endless trove of "Wertheriana" attests--achieved its effect by disseminating itself throughout European culture.
        It is worth noting that Werther was based to a certain extent upon experiences in Goethe's life.  While staying in Wetzlar in 1772, Goethe formed a great passion for Charlotte Buff, who was betrothed to the remarkably understanding Johann Christian Kestner.  The story--recounted to Goethe by Kestner--of young man in a similar situation who committed suicide in despair provided the inspiration for the transformation of this experience into a novel. Ironically, after the publication of Werther, Goethe moved to Weimar where he fell in love with a married woman named, inescapably, Charlotte von Stein.  The relationship proved to be as intense and frustrating as the one depicted in Werther.  It took a long vacation in Italy to cure Goethe of this passion.
        In terms of Goethe's own literary development, Werther seems to have functioned as a transitional work.  Falling between the exuberance of his Storm and Stress works and the austere restraint of what has been termed Weimar classicism, Werther seems to be a culminating point of emotional excess in Goethe's work.  Subsequently, Goethe successfully sublimated such excess. Thus, despite the fact that the novel was his most successful and famous work, Goethe maintained a cautious and circumspect relationship to it.
        One of the most remarked upon facts about Werther is the fantastic success it enjoyed in Europe.  The reception accorded the novel was so ardent that in Germany it was termed Wertherfieber [Werther fever].  Not only was the novel retold, continued, and parodied in novels, poems, and plays, but it inspired fashions (the signature blue jacket and yellow vest worn by Werther), prints, porcelain designs, and a rash of imitative suicides.  It even boasted among its fans Napoleon, who claimed he carried it in his pocket during his expedition to Egypt.
Werther, however, was much more than a broad popular success.   It was one of the key indices of a sea change in European culture.  Werther helped to make clear that the shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism was not simply a shift in cultural fashion but a transformation of sensibility and affect. Werther contributed to this change on both a formal and conceptual level.
        On the formal level, the language in the novel was characterized by clarity and immediacy of emotional expression.  The epistolary format of the novel helped Goethe to achieve this effect.  Moving away from the use of letters--as in Smollet's Humphry Clinker--to underscore the picaresque, episodic nature of narrative, Goethe pursued a path forged by Samuel Richardson, employing letters to delve ever deeper into the interiority of the protagonist.  The language of the letters, moreover, while dealing with emotions in extremis, is characterized by a pellucid directness.   It is this aspect that rooted the novel in the larger articulation of a form of subjectivity specific to a middle class that was gradually emancipating itself.  As Jürgen Habermas has argued with regard to socio-political formations and as Ian Watt has argued more specifically with regard to the genre of the novel, the emergent middle class required discursive forms that were characterized by their communicability.  These discursive forms facilitated a mastery of the physical and social environment as well as oneself.  Indeed, in a world characterized less and less by the pre-established strictures of feudalism, self-direction, self-awareness and self-management became essential.  Thus, for instance, the linkage of novels like Richardson's Pamela to conduct manuals is not as coincidental as it may at first seem.  However, Goethe's novel ultimately exceeds the bounds of these discursive forms in that it is the story of the ultimate failure of self-management.
        On the conceptual level, then, Werther helped to introduce the notion of an expansive interiority that the subject itself did not fully understand or control.  This uncontrollability crystallized in the form of passion.  Passion--true to its etymology--was a force at the innermost core of interiority that the subject had no choice but to suffer.  In its milder forms it helped make possible the transition from the meticulous cataloguing of interiority to be found in Rousseau's Confessions to the frustratingly ex post facto understanding of the self to be found in Wordsworth's Prelude.  In its more exaggerated forms it helped give license to the demonic passion of Mozart's Don Giovanni to become the frank Liebestod of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.  Werther's passion, accordingly, assumed the form of a spectacle, with its own attendant and inexorable stations of the cross, that revealed that the minute inspection of the self could turn into an abyss from which no form of management or regulation might be salvaged.
        Goethe's novel thus contributed to the articulation of a middle class subjectivity, but in a way that pinpointed the fissures that threatened to sunder that very subjectivity.  The government of the self--which is the essence of the subjective and social revolution of the middle class--was shown to be a dangerous illusion.  Indeed, the eroticized relation to one's own subjection that self-government (in all its senses) necessitated is exposed in Goethe's novel to lead to the dissolution of the self. Hence, while Werther still serves as a document of a profound change in sensibility in the eighteenth century, there remains something dangerous and subversive about the novel.  For if it is an index of the articulation of a new discourse of passion as well as middle class subjectivity, the novel makes clear how unstable, excessive, and destructive these new formations could be.  It is ultimately a document not of the articulation, but of the disarticulation of a discourse.  This aspect of Werther was brilliantly captured by Roland Barthes, who made the novel a touchstone for his own Lover's Discourse.
 
 

Translations:
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings, translated by Catherine Hutter, New York: NAL, 1962; The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella, translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Brogan, New York: Modern Library, 1971; The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities and Novella, translated by Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, New York: Surhkamp, 1988; The Sorrows of Young Werther, translated by Michael Hulse, New York: Viking Press, 1989.

Further Reading:
Atkins, Stuart, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949
Blackall, Eric, Goethe and the Novel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976
Friedenthal, Richard, Goethe: His Life and Times, New York: World Publishing Company, 1963
Hatfield, Henry, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964
Lukács, Georg, Goethe and His Age, London: Merlin Press, 1968
Vincent, Dierde, Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992