Death in Venice /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann--here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim

Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.

In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• About the Series
• About This Volume
• Part I Death in Venice: The Complete Text
• Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts
• The Complete Text [Translated by David Luke]
• Part II Death in Venice: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism
• Critical History of Death in Venice
• Psychoanalytic Criticism and Death in Venice
• What Is Psychoanalytic Criticism?
• Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Selected Bibliography
• A Psychoanalytic Perspective:
• The Eruption of the Other: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Death in Venice
• Reader-Response Criticism and Death in Venice
• What Is Reader-Response Criticism?
• Reader-Response Criticism: A Selected Bibliography
• A Reader-Response Perspective:
• The Potential Deceptiveness of Reading in Death in Venice
• Cultural Criticism and Death in Venice
• What Is Cultural Criticism?
• Cultural Criticism: A Selected Bibliography
• A Cultural Perspective:
• Why Is Tadzio Polish? Kultur and Cultural Multiplicity in Death in Venice
• Gender Criticism and Death in Venice
• What Is Gender Criticism?
• Gender Criticism: A Selected Bibliography
• A Perspective on Gender and Sexuality
• The Life and Work of Thomas Mann: A Gay Perspective
• New Historicism and Death in Venice
• What Is New Historicism?
• New Historicism: A Selected Bibliography
• A New Historicist Perspective:
• History and Community in Death in Venice
• Glossary of Critical and Theoretical Terms
• About the Contributors

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Mann's novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), traces the declining fortunes of a merchant family much like his own as it gradually loses interest in business but gains an increasing artistic awareness. Mann was only 26 years old when this novel made him one of Germany's leading writers.

Mann went on to write The Magic Mountain (1924), in which he studies the isolated world of the tuberculosis sanitarium. The novel was based on his wife's confinement in such an institution. Doctor Faustus (1947), his masterpiece, describes the life of a composer who sells his soul to the devil as a price for musical genius.

Mann is also well known for Death in Venice (1912) and Mario the Magician (1930), both of which portray the tensions and disturbances in the lives of artists. His last unfinished work is The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954), a brilliantly ironic story about a nineteenth-century swindler.

An avowed anti-Nazi, Mann left Germany and lived in the United States during World War II. He returned to Switzerland after the war and became a celebrated literary figure in both East and West Germany. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

(Bowker Author Biography)