Bluebeard's Chamber by Michael Maar

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Bluebeard's Chamber by Michael Maar

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Summary

This literary analysis suggests the themes of guilt and confession that haunt Thomas Mann's work originate in the author's own traumatic experience in Naples. Did he witness or participate in a brutal murder?

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Bluebeard's Chamber by Michael Maar

Over the last twenty years, much critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted his homosexuality. This not only is presented as a dynamic underlying Mann's creative work, but also is the supposed reason for the theme of guilt and redemption that grew ever stronger in Mann's fiction, and for his panic in 1933 that his early diaries would fall into the hands of the Nazis. Michael Maar mounts a devastating forensic challenge to this consensus: Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation, which he saw as no reason for guilt. But sexuality in Mann's work is inextricably bound up with an eruption of violence. Maar pursues this trail through Mann's writings and traces its origins back to Mann's second visit to Italy, during which the Devil appeared to him in Palestrina. Something happened to the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Mann in Naples that marked him for life with a burdensome sense of guilt...but what exactly was it?
Germany's most gifted literary critic of the younger generation* London Review of Books *
Michael Maar is one of Germany's leading literary critics. Formerly a visiting professor at Stanford University, he is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the German Academy for Language and Literature.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781859845295
ISBN 10 1859845290
Title Bluebeard's Chamber
Author Michael Maar
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Verso Books
Year published 2003-10-17
Number of pages 152
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.