Thomas Mann and Shakespeare ─ Something Rich and Strange

Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare is the first 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 Kröger with Othello and Love's Labour's Lost with Doktor Faustus. Showing how the conjunction of Shakespeare and Mann affords new, alternative perspectives on fundamental issues such as modernity, irony, art, desire, authorship and religion, Thomas Mann and Shakespeare challenges the increasingly walled-in specialism of literary topics and periodization and demonstrates the scope for new ways of reading in literary studies.

Tobias Doring is Chair of English Literature, LMU Munchen, Germany, and past President of the German Shakespeare Society. His latest books are (ed. with Virginia Mason Vaughan) Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare's The Tempest – 1611 to the Present and (ed. with Mark Stein) Edward Said's Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism.

Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. His latest book, The Demonic: Literature and Experience, gives considerable attention to Shakespeare and Mann.