A Reader's Guide to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: 254 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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