Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange

In Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann associated Shakespeare with the Devil and the demonic guilt of Nazism. Bringing together major scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, this is the first ever book-length study to explore the always fascinating if sometimes disturbing connections between Shakespeare and Mann. It establishes startling resonances between the central works of these two authors, pairing, for instance,Der Zauberberg with The Tempest, Der Tod in Venedig with The Merchant of Venice, Tonio Kroger withOthello, as well as Love's Labour's Lost with Doktor Faustus. It shows how the conjunction of Shakespeare and Mann affords new, alternative perspectives on fundamental issues such as modernity, irony, art, desire, authorship and religion. In the process, it demonstrates the scope for new ways of reading in literary studies in general, by renewing European intellectual connections in the wake of postcolonialism, and challenging the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization.

Tobias Doring is Chair of English Literature at LMU Munchen, Germany. His previous books includePerformances of mourning in Shakespearean theatre and early modern culture andCaribbean-English Passages: intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition. He is President of the German Shakespeare Society.

Ewan Fernie is Chair of Shakespeare Studies and Fellow of The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author ofShame in Shakespeare and The Demonic: Literature and Experience, and editor ofSpiritual Shakespeares and (with others) Reconceiving the Renaissance. He wroteRedcrosse, a new poetic liturgy for St George's Day with the poets Andrew Motion, Michael Symmons Roberts and Jo Shapcott and the theologian Andrew Shanks. Fernie is General Editor of the ArdenShakespeare Now! series with Simon Palfrey; he works with the prominent British playwright Lucy Bailey; and he sits on the RSC committee for the Shakespeare celebrations of 2016.