Death in Venice » (Unabridged)

German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Among his most famous works are Buddenbrooks, published when he was just twenty-six, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus.

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 Gustav 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."

Kirkus Reviews

New versions of 12 celebrated stories, including the famous title novella, many previously collected in Mann's seminal Stories of Three Decades. Neugroschel's persuasive "Preface" makes a strong case for fresh translations, given both this century's inevitable linguistic shifts and Mann's employment within individual works of specific vocabularies and styles (e.g., those of Wagnerian opera in the hair-raising "The Blood of the Walsungs"). And Neugr"schel essentially finesses the issue of revealing the stories' inherent sexuality; their author was, after all, a master of elegant indirection dedicated to muted presentations of matters that were anathema to both his public and his own sedulously respectable persona. That said, it's wonderful to have vivid, lucid English versions of Mann's sophisticated portrayals of sexual obsession and humiliation ("Little Herr Friedemann"), illness- as-metaphor in a tale ("Tristan") that concisely prefigures The Magic Mountain, and the transfiguring intersection of artistic with homosexual passion (Death in Venice, Tonio Kr"ger). Brilliant work, in any case, from one of the century's great writers.

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:
Rodney Symington, 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:
Lillian R. Furst, 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:
John Burt Foster Jr., 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
Robert Tobin, 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:
Russell A. Berman, History and Community in Death in Venice

Glossary of Critical and Theoretical Terms

About the Contributors