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Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare is the first book-length study to explore the always fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, connections between Shakespeare and Mann. It establishes startling resonances between the central works of these two authors, pairing, for instance, Der Zauberberg with The Tempest , Der Tod in Venedig with The Merchant of Venice , Tonio Kroger with Othello and Love''s Labour''s Lost with Doktor Faustus . Showing how the conjunction of Shakespeare and Mann affords new, alternative perspectives on fundamental issues such as modernity, irony, art, desire, authorship and religion, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare challenges the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization and demonstrates the scope for new ways of reading in literary studies.>
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Something Rich and Strange (with A Note on
Mann's Shakespeare, by Tobias Döring, LMU München, Germany)
Ewan Fernie (University of Birmingham, UK)
1 The Violence of Desire: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Mann
Jonathan Dollimore (University of York, UK)
2 Laughter in the Throat of Death: Thomas Mann's
Shakespearean Sprachkrise
Richard Wilson (University of Kingston, UK)
3 Masquerades of Love: Love's Labours's Lost and the Musical
Development of Shakespeare's Comedy in Mann's Doktor
Faustus
Alexander Honold (Universität Basel, Switzerland)
4 The Magic Fountain: Shakespeare, Mann and Modern
Authorship
Tobias Döring (LMU München, Germany)
5 'A dark exception among the rule-abiding': Thomas Mann
and Othello
Friedhelm Marx (Universität Bamberg, Germany)
6 'Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath':
Shakespearean Overtones in Mann's Der Tod in Venedig
John T. Hamilton (Harvard University, USA)
7 Shakespeare to Mann, via Wagner
Dave Paxton (University of Birmingham, UK)
8 'Yes-yes, no': Mann, Shakespeare, and the Struggle for
Affirmation
Ewan Fernie (University of Birmingham, UK)
9 Teenage Fanclub: Mann and Shakespeare in the Queer
Pantheon
Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
10 A Kind of Loving: Hans Castorp as Model Critic 207
David Fuller (University of Durham, UK)
11 Changing the Subject
Ulrike Draesner (writer and translator, Berlin, Germany)
Afterword
Elisabeth Bronfen (Universität Zürich, Switzerland)
About the author
Tobias Döring is Chair of English Literature, LMU München, Germany, and past President of the German Shakespeare Society. His latest books are (ed. with Virginia Mason Vaughan) Critical
and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest – 1611 to the Present and (ed. with Mark Stein) Edward Said’s Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism.
Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. His latest book, The Demonic: Literature and Experience, gives considerable attention to Shakespeare and Mann.
Report
When Thomas Mann speaks of 'the most tremendous case of poetic genius the world has ever seen', he is referring not to Homer, nor to Goethe - but to Shakespeare. It is strange that this important identification has been so little heeded or seriously examined for so long. At last the present book makes up for such neglect, opening our eyes to the truly 'tremendous case' of one of the great dialogues of world literature.
[Wenn Thomas Mann über den 'den ungeheuersten Fall von Dichtertum' spricht, 'den die Erde sah', dann spricht er weder von Homer noch von Goethe, sondern von Shakespeare. Es ist eigenartig, wie lange dieses Diktum kaum gehört und wie selten es ernst genommen wurde. Dass das Versäumte mit diesem Buch endlich nachgeholt wird, öffnet den Blick auf den wahrhaft 'ungeheuren Fall' eines Dialogs von weltliterarischem Ausmaß.]
Heinrich Detering, President of the German Academy for Language and Literature, and chief editor of the Great Annotated Frankfurter Edition of the works of Thomas Mann
