Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

- George Steiner, "Times Literary Supplement" " 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" & quot; 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.& quot; - Peter Demetz, Der Spiegel & quot; 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.& quot; - George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement "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"

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. he English translation ofOutsiders includes a new preface by the author and a foreword by Ihab Hassan.