16: Suggestions for Further Reading and Research
Doctor Faustus is one of the most influential and most talked-about literary works of the twentieth century. The period from 1947 to 1950 alone saw the publication of over three hundred popular reviews; academic journals began printing studies of Doctor Faustus in 1948, within a year of the novel’s original publication date. Naturally, these first academic articles appeared in American journals, because the German university establishment still lay in ruins so shortly after the war.
In the seventy-five years that have passed since then, interest in the novel has continued unabated. It would be impossible to summarize all the pertinent critical developments in a short essay, and also unnecessary for a first-time reader. My aim in this chapter is instead to equip readers with the best possible tools to help them delve deeper into the novel, and into the life and thought of Thomas Mann more generally. To this end, I first provide an annotated list of what I consider standard reference works on Doctor Faustus. Then, I present a curated selection of article-length scholarship that has been published in English over the past fifty years. Readers with an advanced knowledge of German will, of course, have access to a much wider range of research. A comprehensive bibliography that is current up to 2007 can be found in the commentary volume to the Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe of Doctor Faustus (see further information in chapter 2 of this guide). For scholarship since then, the yearbook of the German Thomas Mann Society, the Thomas Mann Jahrbuch currently edited by Katrin Bedenig, Marc von Moos, and Hans Wißkirchen, is an invaluable starting point.