A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin: 65 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) - Softcover

Camden House brings its usual high standards to this assemblage of essays by 13 noted scholars. Comprehensive and well-researched .... CHOICE

A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin succeeds in its plan to illuminate Döblin's work from the most varied standpoints. ...This volume can be recommended both for the expert on the secondary literature to Döblin and to the reader new to the works of this great author. SEMINAR

A comprehensive and informative introduction to the difficult work of a central author of the 20th century. MONATSHEFTE

Many non-specialists would be hard pressed to name a single work of Döblin's beyond his great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.... The current volume attempts to address this imbalance and does an excellent job of introducing readers to the full range and at times baffling variety of Döblin's production. GERMAN QUARTERLY

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was one of the great German-Jewish writers of the 20th century, a major figure in the German avant-garde before the First World War and a leading intellectual during the Weimar Republic. Döblin greatly influenced the history of the German novel: his best-known work, the best-selling 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, has frequently been compared in its use of internal monologue and literary montage to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer . Döblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels, but in this genre, he offered a surprising variety of narrative techniques, themes, structures, and outlooks. Döblin's impact on German writers after the Second World War was considerable: Günter Grass, for example, acknowledged him as "my teacher." And yet, while Alexanderplatz continues to fascinate the reading public, it has overshadowed the rest of Döblin's immense oeuvre. This volume of carefully focused essays seeks to do justice to such important texts as Döblin's early stories, his numerous other novels, his political, philosophical, medical, autobiographical, and religious essays, his experimental plays, and his writings on the new media of cinema and radio.

Contributors: Heidi Thomann Tewarson, David Dollenmayer, Neil H. Donahue, Roland Dollinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Gabriele Sander, Erich Kleinschmidt, Wulf Koepke, Helmut F. Pfanner, Helmuth Kiesel, Klaus Müller-Salget, Christoph Bartscherer, Wolfgang Düsing.

Roland Dollinger is Associate Professor of German at Sarah Lawrence College; Wulf Koepke is Professor Emeritus of German at Texas A&M University; Heidi Thomann Tewarson is Professor of German at Oberlin College.