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Full Description
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.
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
