Copyright

Tobias Boes

The eBook edition of this book is available under the Open Access Licence CC BY-NC-ND. Open Access publication of this book was made possible through generous grants from Notre Dame’s Franco Family Center for the Liberal Arts and the Public Good, as well as from the Thomas Mann House (TMH) in Pacific Palisades.

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)

First published 2025

by Camden House

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ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-180-3 (hardback); 978-1-64014-223-7 (paperback); 978-1-80543-714-7 (ePDF); 978-1-80543-715-4 (ePUB)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Boes, Tobias, author.

Title: A reader’s guide to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus / Tobias Boes.

Description: Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2025. | Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture; 254 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Mann, Thomas, 1875–1955. Doktor Faustus. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PT2625.A44 D6326 2025 (print) | LCC PT2625.A44 (ebook) | DDC 833/.912—dc23/eng/20241213

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024058721

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024058722

Cover image: Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, engraving, 1514. Public domain, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943. | Design: Toni Michelle

Details

A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-298283

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.

Author

Tobias Boes

PublisherCamden House

Print publication date Jun, 2025

Print ISBN 9781640141803

EISBN 9781805437154

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Copyright

A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Chapter illustrations ()