Overview

Provides the English-speaking reader with the tools needed to appreciate Thomas Mann's most ambitious novel, one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, now timely once again. In 1938, the great German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States. There, he became a figurehead for the intellectual opposition to Nazism, giving more than 150 public lectures and recording more than fifty anti-Nazi radio addresses that the BBC broadcast into Germany. His political activities also left a profound mark on his fiction, most importantly on the 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Ostensibly the biography of a fictional modern composer, Doctor Faustus also serves as a post-mortem of Nazism and a reckoning with five centuries of cultural history that led to dazzling heights but failed to prevent Germany's ultimate fall. Doctor Faustus is an astonishingly complex novel, both because of the range of its intellectual references and because of its stylistic inventiveness, which has provoked comparisons with Joyce. And yet, at a time when democracy around the world once again seems in retreat and the forces of irrationalism are in advance, it is also an extremely timely book. This guide will equip English-speaking readers with all the tools necessary to appreciate one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Full Product Details

Author:   Professor Tobias Boes
Publisher:   Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Imprint:   Camden House Inc
Weight:   0.666kg
ISBN:  

9781640142237

ISBN 10:   1640142231
Pages:   300
Publication Date:   17 June 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Language:   German

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on References to Doctor Faustus Part One: Getting Started 1. Why Read Doctor Faustus in the Twenty-First Century? 2. Which Edition of Doctor Faustus Should I Buy? 3. What Should I Pay Attention to as I Read the Novel? Part Two: Contexts 4. Composition and Publication History 5. A Brief History of the Faust Theme 6. Doctor Faustus and Literary Modernism 7. The Historical Setting of the Novel 8. Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Other People's Suffering Part Three: Interpretations 9. Five Masters from Germany: Leverkühn as Artist and Intellectual 10. Music Theory and Political Allegory: Leverkühn as Fascist 11. Illness and Redemption: Leverkühn as Christ Part Four: Materials for Consultation 12. Chapter Summaries and Page-By-Page Commentaries 13. Cast of Characters 14. Timeline of Events in the Novel 15. List of Adrian Leverkühn's Major Compositions 16. Suggestions for Further Reading and Research Index

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Author Information

TOBIAS BOES is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, IN.

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