Death In Venice

by Thomas Mann

Overview

This critical edition of Mann's 1912 modernist novella reprints the widely praised translation by David Luke. Accompanying this text, five critical essays examine the work from five contemporary critical perspectives:
Psychoanalytic Criticism, by Rodney Symington
Reader-Response Criticism, by Lilian Furst
Cultural Criticism, by John Burt Foster, jr.
Gender Criticism, by Robert Tobin
New History, by Russell Berman

A succinct introduction to the history, principles, and practice of each critical approach precedes each essay. Readers may also benefit from extensive bibliographies following the essays and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms.

The editor's introduction to the book discusses biographical and historical contexts for both Mann and his text. Her survey of critical responses to it starts in 1912 and ends in 1998.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613825082
Publisher:	Simon & Brown
Publication date:	09/25/2018
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d)

About the Author

German novelist, short story author, social commentator, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Paul Thomas Mann lived from 6 June 1875 to 12 August 1955. His sardonic and highly symbolic epic novels and novellas are renowned for their understanding of the minds of artists and intellectuals. He incorporated modernized versions of German and Biblical tales, as well as concepts from Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his analysis and critique of the European and German spirit. In his first book, Buddenbrooks, Mann-a member of the Hanseatic Mann family-depicted his clan and social status. Three of Heinrich Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann, and Golo Mann, all went on to become well-known German writers, as did his older brother Heinrich Mann, a radical writer. Mann escaped to Switzerland in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took office. He relocated to the United States in 1939 when World War II began, then went back to Switzerland in 1952. One of the most well-known authors of the so-called Exilliteratur, German writing produced in exile by individuals opposed to the Hitler government, is Mann.

Editorial Reviews

New versions of 12 celebrated stories, including the famous title novella, many previously collected in Mann's seminal Stories of Three Decades. Neugroschel's persuasive "Preface" makes a strong case for fresh translations, given both this century's inevitable linguistic shifts and Mann's employment within individual works of specific vocabularies and styles (e.g., those of Wagnerian opera in the hair-raising "The Blood of the Walsungs"). And Neugr"schel essentially finesses the issue of revealing the stories' inherent sexuality; their author was, after all, a master of elegant indirection dedicated to muted presentations of matters that were anathema to both his public and his own sedulously respectable persona. That said, it's wonderful to have vivid, lucid English versions of Mann's sophisticated portrayals of sexual obsession and humiliation ("Little Herr Friedemann"), illness- as-metaphor in a tale ("Tristan") that concisely prefigures The Magic Mountain, and the transfiguring intersection of artistic with homosexual passion (Death in Venice, Tonio Kr"ger). Brilliant work, in any case, from one of the century's great writers.

Kirkus Reviews