T. J. Reed

Illuminates how selected great works of literature arose, leading to deepened understanding of the works and harking back to what we still call the humanities. This monumental study seeks the roots of great literary works and the processes by which they arose. It first illuminates the process from idea and inspiration through intention, formulation, revision (and sometimes frustration) to publication and reception. The textual studies that follow range from single poems to epic and dramatic works, from the genesis of new genres to that of a whole career. T. J. Reed sets the scene by going back to Homer's epics and the Bible, refreshing familiar scholarly material with new insights. Two early modern chapters then treat Montaigne, the founder of a new self-confidence, and Shakespeare, the beginner shaped by and shaping history. In the book's second half Reed concentrates on his specialty, modern German literature: Goethe, Büchner, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Celan, and Christa Wolf. A sense of the origins of literary meaning in each case is a firm foundation for understanding, staying close to the quick of human communication. Against the depersonalized, skeptical, theory-laden readings of literature that have been dominant in recent decades, this study harks back to what we still call the humanities.

The 1997 London Heine Conference brought together leading scholars and critics from Austria, Britain and Germany. The essays collected in this volume offer a broad canvas of Heine's themes and techniques, his debts and his influence, the ancient and modern connections of his work, its epic and lyrical forms, together with materials and comparisons drawn from English, German, Russian, Jewish and Islamic sources, and the musical settings of his poems. The collection complements recent scholarship, much of which has explored Heine's theoretical and other prose works, by paying close attention once more to the inexhaustible riches of his poetry.

T.J. Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Thomas mann, and offers as comprehensive a view of Mann's fiction and thought as is available in any language. It is based on a coherent close reading of Mann's oeuvre, literary and political, and also on manuscripts and sources, and was part of the first phase of literary scholarship that opened up the resources of the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive. Further documents that have appeared since then - Mann's diaries, notebooks, and other correspondences - have not fundamentally altered the individual interpretations or the overall picture the study offers, and in some respects have emphatically confirmed them. A further chapter added to this edition covers the new documentation, gives a vigorous account of the main curents in Mann scholarship and criticism over the last two decades suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and above all the complex relationship between the three.

The literary work which Goethe produced and stimulated in his Weimar years - the greater part of his life - gave to a country which was not yet a nation the centre of artistic and intellectual authority it lacked. T. J. Reed's study traces the way this came about, against what social and politcal difficulties and literary opposition, and places the results in the larger context of German cultural history. The historical narrative is built up from a precise analysis of the major (and many minor) texts of the period, and weaves individual writers' careers persuasively into the broader pattern.