A Companion to Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain'

Thomas Mann was the first writer since Goethe to attract a large international audience to German literature. His second major work, "The Magic Mountain" (1924), explores the heady intellectual culture of the chaotic and broken Germany that emerged from World War. For that work, and the earlier "Buddenbrooks", he was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mann himself considered "The Magic Mountain" to be his greatest novel, and few in his own day doubted the pre-eminence of this modernist classic. However, in an age when it is argued that the age of literary modernism has passed, a new framework is required within which to understand Mann's masterpiece. Such a framework is offered by this text, which provides a survey of and research into important aspects of "The Magic Mountain". The topics covered include Mann's comic vision, his homosexuality, his fraught attitude towards Jews, the place of his novel in the landscape of postmodern life, the theme of solitude, music in the novel, and technology.