Thomas Mann began work on Doctor Faustus in May 1943, having just completed Joseph and his Brothers. A year earlier, as he was putting the finishing touches to the biblical tetralogy, he found his thoughts already turning towards this next novel, a daring new artist's tale that might, he believed, be the most bizarre and outlandish he had ever produced. A month before beginning the book Mann disclosed what he had in mind: to take up a project he had conceived as early as 1904, the story of an artist in league with the devil for the sake of creativity, a modern-day Faust who would sell his soul to make wondrous works of art (letters to Agnes E. Meyer, 21 February 1942, and to Klaus Mann, 27 April 1943). Art and artistry were of course familiar concerns for Mann, but why, we might ask, would he choose just now in the middle of the Second World War to devote an ambitious new novel to the tribulations of the artist? Living in exile along with other refugees in the United States, Mann was following the progress of Hitler's war with the distress of a German worried about the guilt and fate of his people. With the popularity of his translated works in America, moreover, he was becoming a prominent spokesperson on the German issue. Surely this was not the moment for him to rework the predicament of Tonio Kröoger, Gustav Aschenbach, and the other frustrated artists who populate his tales, a strangely intellectual topic given the atrocities taking place in Europe. The author would have to make himself clear.

While staying in Venice with his wife and brother between 26 May and 2 June 1911, Thomas Mann, like his fictional Aschenbach, was fascinated by a handsome Polish boy whom he watched playing on the beach. This 'personal and lyrical experience', as Mann later described it in a muchquoted confessional letter, prompted the story Death in Venice. And just as Mann's protagonist Aschenbach is inspired by the sight of Tadzio to write 'a page and a half of exquisite prose' on an unspecified problem of taste and culture (viii, 493), so Mann wrote a short essay on his changing attitude to Wagner. Having idolised Wagner for many years, he confessed, he was now turning away from the composer’s steamy Romanticism and towards a new classicism:

One of the most astute early reviews of Buddenbrooks was written by a young poet who was Thomas Mann's exact contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke. What strikes today's reader is not so much Rilke's positive response to the novel as his perceptive grasp of the inner tensions that give Buddenbrooks its unique and innovative character. Rilke describes Mann as having reconceptualised the traditional role of chronicler in a modern way. At the same time as Mann builds up an increasing sense of material concreteness in what he depicts, he also works over the surface of his presentation with 'a hundred furrows', producing an unusual richness of detail. While avoiding authorial intrusions in which 'a supercilious writer bends down to the ear of a supercilious reader', Mann maintains a narrative objectivity that nonetheless gets us involved, just as if we were reading our own family documents, discovered 'in some secret drawer'. Rilke's review, published in 1902, recognises fundamental aspects of the position of Buddenbrooks in the first year of the twentieth century. Rilke is fully aware of the novel's double character as a record of an actually experienced reality and a carefully constructed and intricately developed work of art. He assesses quite deftly what has since been called Mann's 'irony': his ability to hold sympathy and critical distance in balance.

In his impetuous youth, Gustav Aschenbach 'sent seed corn to the mill' (viii, 454), but such rashness pales in comparison to how Thomas Mann, writing his Venetian novella, cast most of his own store of seed corn to the winds. The enumeration of Aschenbach's achievements (viii, 450) assigns nearly all the projects in Mann's own notebooks and unfinished manuscripts to the accomplished oeuvre on which Aschenbach's fame rests. After that, visibly the same works could hardly appear in the bookstores under another author's name. The novella that depicts an aging writer's failing creativity dealt with its real author's mid-life creative crisis by forcing a clean sweep of plans which had long been engaging, but perhaps also blocking, his imaginative energies. That is the first thing that has to be recognised about the place of The Magic Mountain in Mann's literary biography: its themes and techniques emerged to fill the gap he had bravely, perhaps even desperately, created by letting Aschenbach complete his own previous plans. We, of course, now know that Buddenbrooks was not to be Mann's only work on the grand scale, but in July 1912, when Death in Venice appeared, he himself knew no such thing. What he did know was that the kind of fame he had tasted and longed to extend required more 'big' novels, and highly acclaimed ones at that, for its sustenance. He seems at first not to have anticipated that the 'novella' or 'story' which he first mentions in correspondence in the second half of 1913 as a 'humorous companion-piece' to Death in Venice would grow into one of the classic long novels of the twentieth century and would give a completely new dimension to his reputation, founding that view of him as an artist of encyclopaedic range which for the rest of his life he generally relished, though occasionally lamented.

Thomas Mann is chiefly known as a novelist in the European tradition. The novel is an artistic hybrid of storytelling, immoral behaviour and moral consciousness. This holds true for Thomas Mann's fiction, although in his case it is complicated by specifically German factors.

The first is that the German novel tradition has characteristics of its own. Both Goethe and the Romantics made distinct contributions to the literary genre of the novel, usually in the form of attempts to modify its hybrid constitution in one way or another. The Goethean Bildungsroman concentrates on the moral development of one individual character, and the artistic aspect of the novel’s composition is enhanced not only by this thematic focus, but also by the belief in the meaningful shape of the education process itself. As the protagonist is formed, so is the novel. The Romantics promoted the hybrid heterogeneity of the novel, its mixture of narrative and essayism, to the status of a defining principle of all art. For them it was (at least theoretically) the only art form equal to the task of capturing the metaphysical interpenetration of subjective and objective realities. Thomas Mann was conscious of both these strains in the German literary inheritance, and we shall return to them. But it is from Wagner’s music drama, which was understood by Mann and others to be the last flowering of Romanticism, that Mann most clearly derived aspects of his literary technique, aspects that strained against the novel form’s own pragmatic heterogeneity.

The genesis of this work spans much of Thomas Mann's creative career. His collection of material dates back to 1910. In 1922 the first part of the book appeared under the title Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Buch der Kindheit [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years]. In 1951, after his work on Doctor Faustus had once more delayed the continuation of the Confessions, Mann returned to this novel and to his former thematic trajectory. Hans Wysling, in his authoritative study, unfolds the multitude of literary influences and delineates the essential concepts and traditions which informed the Confessions. According to Wysling, the two creative phases are marked by distinctive shifts of models. The early phase is inspired by three major models: Georges Manolescu's memoirs A Prince of Thieves (1905), Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], which is part of the great eighteenth-century tradition of autobiographical and confessional writing, and the fairy-tale motif of the Glückskind, the fortunate child. All three models are more or less refracted and modified by other concepts. For example, Manolescu's literary memoirs of a self-proclaimed confidence man are problematised by the Protestant ethic of self-examination and the psychoanalytical school of self-interrogation. Whereas Felix Krull's imitation of Goethe's Poetry and Truth lacks the aspects of societal integration and self-realisation so essential to the eighteenth-century ethos of Bildung or self-cultivation, the deployment of the fairy-tale plot of the Glückskind is enriched both by the psychoanalytical complex of primary narcissism, which is symptomatic for the early stage of childhood development, and by the mythological features of collective archetypes. The protagonist's name Felix, signifying the happy one, is onomastic testimony to the felicitous nature and fate of his composite psychomythic character.

In 1921 Samuel Fischer, Thomas Mann's German publisher, and Alfred A. Knopf reached an agreement whereby Knopf would have exclusive rights for Mann's works in the USA. Mann, aware that his works would be known to a great many of his readers not in the German originals but in the English translations - that in effect the latter would constitute the works of Thomas Mann as far as the English-speaking world was concerned - was in no doubt about the importance of their being well translated: in a letter concerning The Magic Mountain he expressed his wish for 'a translation of a high artistic standard' ('eine künstlerisch hochwertige Übersetzung'). (He could not have foreseen that even greater importance would accrue to the English versions with the Nazi suppression of his works in Germany and his eventual exile in the USA.)

Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925) and Mario and the Magician (1930) have often been linked because they conveniently span the life of the Weimar Republic and its two major crises. The eponymous 'disorder' of the earlier story concerns the economic distress resulting from the disaster of a lost war, whereas Mario and the Magician presages the political crisis which will follow a new financial crash. How short the period between Weimar's first and second crises was in reality, and how brief it must have seemed to Thomas Mann, is underlined by the fact that only five years separate the publication of the two tales. Both stories have obvious autobiographical elements.

The use of the term ‘disorder’ is in one sense an understatement. It covers a recent German history of terrible experiences. But the upheavals in German society after the First World War were too well known to German readers in 1925 to need spelling out. And however dramatic the events, unless directly involved in them, individuals generally experience such crises in trivial terms of day-to-day survival and adjustment to changing moral and social conditions. This is how Thomas Mann chooses to present the period: through the situation of one family and the eyes of one individual in particular.

It has become a commonplace of criticism to refer to Mann as an 'intellectual novelist', and certainly Mann himself did nothing to discourage the view that he was a philosophical novelist whose works incorporate a vast body of German thought. In the first of his 'Letters from Germany' published in The Dial in November 1922, he spoke of the rise of a type of book he dubbed the 'intellectual novel', but the examples he cited were not exactly works of fiction: Count Hermann Keyserling's Travel Diary of a Philosopher (1919), Ernst Bertram's philosophical study, Friedrich Nietzsche: An Attempt at a Mythology (1918), and Friedrich Gundolf's monumental biography of Goethe (1916), not to mention Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-22) (xiii, 265). Clearly, Mann's novels belong to a rather different category from these texts (although they all have one thing in common - length). This chapter examines Mann's knowledge of major German thinkers and writers, his use of those figures in his novels and essays, and the way their ideas form part of his 'intellectual world'. Beginning with Mann's early fascination with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, I go on to investigate his reinterpretation of Romanticism in the 1920s and his engagement with psychoanalysis in the 1930s. Throughout his writings, however, Mann's continuing preoccupation with Weimar Classicism enables us to reread the development of other aspects of his thought as an attempt in dark times to preserve and develop a tradition of humanism that is distinctively German as well as European. In 'On the German Republic' (1922), Mann defined his conservatism as standing 'not in the service of the past and of reaction, but in the service of the future' (ix, 829); as he termed it in 1926, it was a 'Zukunftskonservatismus' (conservatism of the future), 'serene, removed from all crude, sentimental atavism', and a conservatism 'which, its eye fixed on the new, plays with old cultural forms, in order to rescue them from oblivion' (ix, 189).

A writer's diary can be a vehicle for self-examination, a record of reflection on the craft, a place for drafts and experiments, or itself a literary performance. The subjectivity of literature since the eighteenth century has made diaries both a key to the writer's private world and a substantive part of the work itself, in modern times virtually an independent genre. André Gide's Journal was designed to be just that, and he revised it for publication during his lifetime. Franz Kafka's diaries are a mixture of aperçus, sketches for works, and explorations (or doubts) of his calling to be a writer. Virginia Woolf's diary closely observes the creative process and registers the ebb and flow of her confidence. In the case of Thomas Mann, however, it was only in the early days that his diary was a means to literature, consciously worked on and needed for self-expression (letters to Otto Grautoff, 19 March 1896, 4 April and 21 July 1897). Later it was literary at most in patches and in passing, and intended mainly to be a matter-of-fact record of his daily life, in the most basic sense a 'Tage-Buch'.

As T. J. Reed has remarked, Thomas Mann never seems to have experienced the language crisis characteristic of the early development of many German writers at the turn of the century. Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos Letter', Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and Kafka's Description of a Struggle are paradigmatic moments of a general malaise concerning the function and authenticity of poetic language at the turn of the century that seem to have passed over Mann completely. From his earliest novellas to his 'breakthrough' novel Buddenbrooks, from Tonio Kröger to the great novellas and novels that followed it for more than half a century, Mann seems always already himself, the sovereign master of a voice and narrative manner whose relation to the empirical world of facts, people and events is never seriously in question. Nevertheless, in one short, almost didactic story of 1896 entitled 'Disillusionment' (viii, 62-8), Mann gestures towards a discrepancy between words and things that is indicative of a larger metaphysical concern. Set against the 'magnificently theatrical façade' of San Marco in Venice, the story consists of an older man's bitter monologue to an unnamed narrator about how 'life' has always disappointed him because it has never lived up to its linguistic description. Precisely because of his sensitivity to language, to the 'big words' of the poets, 'life' appears to him as a shadow that feebly limps behind his linguistically charged imagination. In earliest childhood he experienced a great fire that destroyed his house and almost killed his family; but while it was raging, a 'vague presentiment' of something much more terrible and terrifying made the actual fire appear to him 'dull', devoid of excitement, a pale simulacrum of the picture ('Vorstellung') in his mind. This has been true of everything in a long life of travel and experience: the real world of things and facts, of 'Tatsächlichkeiten', leaves him profoundly bored and unmoved.

The perception of Thomas Mann's achievement as a writer and man of letters today rests largely on the relative popularity of his fiction, of his stories and some of his novels. That image has been slightly changed in recent years by the publication of his diaries and of some major new collections of letters, but Mann's prolific work as an essayist of both considerable substance and consummate artistry is little known. His non-fictional prose, written over the first half of this century and covering such subjects as his own life, the theatre (1908) and the German novel, sleep (1909), the artist and the man of letters (1913), the Great War, cosmopolitanism (1925), culture and socialism (1928), the cultural and intellectual climate of the Weimar Republic, many German and European writers and artists, democracy (1938), peace (1938), the problem of freedom and the Second World War (1940), and again major Russian and German figures like Dostoevsky (1946) and Chekhov (1954), Nietzsche (1947) and Schiller (1955) - this vast collection of carefully crafted argumentation is relatively little read. A new annotated German selection of Mann's essays arranged in chronological order in six substantial volumes, the best introduction to Mann the essayist available now, covers barely a third of the estimated six thousand pages of Mann's output. The five volumes of non-fictional writings in the 1974 Fischer edition of Thomas Mann's works give a carefully crafted impression of the nature, range and wealth of his work as an essayist, but not a complete picture of Mann's major and minor essayistic efforts and their varying textual forms. A short introduction to this vast corpus of texts has to subsume them all under a loose definition of the term 'essay'. It also has to explore possible reasons for the controversy surrounding many of them at the time of publication and for their limited influence today.

Within African-American spiritual narratives, conversion most often happens during intense times of loss, grief, misery, pain, and despair, as both a psychological and physical reaction to conditions on earth. Hell is real and it exists on earth; conversion offers deliverance and salvation both for the spiritual body and the physical body. During times of the deepest despair, during the agonies of slavery, during “hell without fires,” most African-American converts reveal that they have been transformed. The rhetoric of conversion relies not just on “otherworldly” experience: for the new believer, conversion offers hope that God can bring healing, comfort, and deliverance to everyday life. Theologian Orlando Costas explains why the conversion experience has special meaning for the “least” of a society:

Eyeing her sister Cassandra, Veronica Morgeson asks for Georges de Buffon's multivolume encyclopedia, proclaiming, “I want to classify Cass.” Veronica's indication of how difficult it may be to categorize even one person points to the preoccupation many characters in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) have with explanatory labels. This preoccupation is understandable, for the world in which these characters live is so fluid and bewildering that what the novel's protagonist, Cassandra Morgeson, calls “comprehension of self” and “comprehension of life” (9) is never fully available to even the most observant of them. Much of the power of The Morgesons, I will suggest, lies in its complication of assumptions about “life” and “self” which prevailed in the 1860s. Its characters - and its readers - are challenged to recognize that neither life nor self is actually commensurate with existing concepts and that making sense of both entails ceaseless intellectual and emotional work, work which reliance on conventional classification impedes.

These challenges distinguish The Morgesons from most contemporary American novels, including the popular domestic fiction of the era such as Susan Warner’s best-selling novel The Wide,Wide World (1850).Women like Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe embraced both Christian doctrine and the ideology of domesticity. Viewing their fiction as a combination of didacticism and entertainment, they told readers what to think and feel, soliciting readers’ identification with their narratives by featuring accessible characters and familiar situations.

Writing in response to the question “How Should Women Write?” (1860), Mary Bryant prescribed a literature that would be at once intellectual and intense, written “honestly and without fear” to suit the seriousness of the era. This volume is our effort to meet Bryant’s challenge, to bring her charge to bear on the history of American women’s writing and the legacy of and prospects for its criticism to date.

Once dismissed as simply sentimental and thus undeniably inferior, nineteenth- century American women’s writing, for at least the last twenty years, has been newly “recovered” or “rediscovered.” The critical occasion for the Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing derives of course from the extensive revitalization of this scholarly discipline. Yet this volume also provides an account of the changing critical assumptions that govern the contemporary study of American women’s writing itself.

Contemporary reappraisals of nineteenth-century American women’s writing have changed both the shape of the American literary canon and the discipline of American literary history. Influential studies abound, from Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977) and Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: a Guide to the Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978, 1993) to Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985) and Cathy N. Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America (1986).

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that the central themes of American literature - “autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power” - are engendered, molded, and “activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism.” Morrison contends that race undergirds even much classic American literature because consciously and unconsciously nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authors dramatized and narrativized the essence of slavery through the trope of the “civilized” free (masters) and the “savage” unfree (slaves). Arguing against overly conservative or literal readings, she concludes, “It would be a pity if the criticism of that literature continued to shellac those texts, immobilizing their complexities and power and luminations just below its tight, reflecting surface. All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes” (Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 90-1).

Complementing this postcolonial response is Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic feminist interpretation of the nineteenth-century American female Gothic as employing the archetypal symbol of the “madwoman in the attic.” These cooped-up women subjects in the literature – perhaps best exemplified by the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” – are physically confined by their surroundings, but they are also confined by other forms of oppression, including the psychological, sexual, and social. Indeed, in that regard, the pun on the meanings of “confinement” as enslavement and also childbirth is highly significant.