Description
Book SynopsisThe first full-length study of the literary criticism on the works of the controversial twentieth-century German writer Hans Henny Jahnn. Hans Henny Jahnn (1894-1959) is one of Germany's most controversial modern authors, in large part due to sharply diverging reactions to the depictions of sado-masochistic brutality, incest, and homoeroticism in his plays and novels. Jahnn's rank as a writer has long been a topic of intense debate between rival schools of critics, and his works have provoked extreme responses, both positive and negative, from a wide spectrum of scholars, writers, and critics, including such prominent figures as Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Wolfgang Koeppen, Walter and Adolf Muschg, Wilhelm Emrich, Hubert Fichte and many others. Freeman focuses on characteristic examples ofdifferent approaches to Jahnn: structuralist, psychoanalytic, Jungian-archetypal, Marxist, biographical, literary-historical, postmodern, gay, and feminist. Freeman shows how behind the veil of objectivity, literary scholars oftenhave a hidden agenda that is based on an emotional reaction to Jahnn's portrayal of homosexuality and violence, his negative images of women, and his worldview, which some critics have linked to some of the same ideological presuppositions as those of National Socialism. This is the first full-length study of Jahnn criticism. Thomas Freeman is associate professor of German at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin.
Trade ReviewThomas Freeman's survey of H. H. Jahnn scholarship -- from the first reviews during the Weimar Republic to the cultural studies and feminist approaches of the 90s -- reads like a detective novel. -- Inge Stephan * HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET BERLIN. *
An overview of Jahnn's work, as well as some interesting and intersecting perspectives on the shape ... of 20th-century literary criticism. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Journalistic Criticism: The Jahnn Controversy and the Discovery of the Misunderstood Outsider First Scholarly Approaches Jahnn and Myth Structure: The Second Generation of Academics Genre and Intertextuality Defenders of Jahnn: Aesthetic and Modernist Interpretations Religion Psychology and Literature Political Ideology and Social Criticism Science: Biopolitics and Literature Gay Studies and Jahnn Feminist Approaches The 1994 Jahnn Centennial Conclusion Works Consulted Index
