Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters - Softcover

Mayer, Hans

3.76

25 ratings by Goodreads

9780262630962: Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262630966 ISBN 13: 9780262630962

Publisher: MIT Press, 1984

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This book brings together recent essays by the highly regarded German literary critic, Hans Mayer. They are studies in alienation organized into three main types of outsiders--women, homosexuals, and Jews--as depicted in literature from Shakespeare and Marlowe to the present. The women in Outsiders are Joan of Arc (as presented by Schiller, Shaw, Brecht, and Vishnevskii), Judith and Delilah (as heroine and vamp), George Eliot and George Sand, Lulu, and contemporary feminists. The homosexuals include protagonists of Marlowe's plays, Winckelmann, Platen, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Ludwig of Bavaria, Tchaikovsky, and the personas of Wilde, Gide, and Genet as seen in their lives and in their novels. The Jews range beyond stereotype from Shylock to Disraeli, the Rothschilds, Heine, Proust's Bloch and Joyce's Bloom, and Trotsky. This English translation of Outsiders includes a new preface by the author.

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Review:

"Mayer means to know exactly how bourgeois society increasingly took away the rights of women, homosexuals, Jews, how these people deprived of rights reacted to the provocation: with camouflage, self-hate, antitype, transmutation, tragic protest." -- Peter Demetz, Der Spiegel "Hans Mayer is not only a literary critic of omnivorous energy, but an individual with an alert social conscience. He has, over the past several years, been producing essays and articles on those categories of human beings whom established society and classic literature have represented as outcasts, marginal men and subversives. In Outsiders he has arrayed these separate writings and reflections in a rather breathless survey ... lively and humane." -- George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Hans Mayer, Professor of German at the University of Tubingen, has also published major studies of Bochner, Wagner, Thomas Mann, Hesse, and Brecht.

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