Thomas Mann's Death in Venice

"This study surveys and analyzes the reception of one of the most famous and most widely read stories in all of modern literature. It treats over seven hundred books, articles, and other reactions to Mann's Death in Venice thematically yet within five chronological categories. This comprehensive chronological approach helps put the extensive criticism and scholarship on Mann's story into literary and historical perspective. Issues raised in the interpretations discussed include art and artists, myths, sources, symbols, style, and narrative structure. Those issues also include politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, homoeroticism, music, and translations. Comparisons of Death in Venice to Mann's other writings are considered, as are comparisons to works by authors such as Euripides, Plato, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Platen, Nietzsche, Gide, Conrad, D'Annunzio, and Mishima. Among the critics, scholars, and reviewers cited are Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, D.H. Lawrence, Georg Lukacs, Lionel Trilling, Wolfgang Koeppen, Susan Sontag, Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Special attention is paid to Luchino Visconti's film Morte a Venezia, to Benjamin Britten's opera Death in Venice, and to other artistic adaptations of Mann's story."--Jacket.