Ellis Shookman Libri

Death in Venice , by Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, is one of the most popular and widely taught works of German literature. It is also a complex work of art that challenges its readers. This reference is a convenient guide to the novella. In addition to providing a plot summary, the volume helps students and general readers discover the literary and intellectual qualities of Mann's famous story. The guide alsos surveys Mann's life and works, compares Death in Venice to Mann's other fiction, as well as to works by other writers, summarizes the events Mann relates, and discusses the genesis, editions, and English translations of his novella. Mann's literary and non-literary influences are considered, along with his narrative style, and the historical, cultural, and sociological factors surrounding Death in Venice . The guide also explains how the issues Mann treated remain current today, and reviews the critical and scholarly reception of his text.

Judging from appearances is an art long considered a science under the rubric of physiognomy. No one in the history of that dubious science stands out more than Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801), a Swiss theologian whose Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-78) informs most modern notions of physiognomy. The essays in this volume reexamine physiognomy - judging from appearances - in relation to Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente (1775) and include Ellis Shookman's Pseudo-Science, Social Fad, Literary Johann Caspar Lavater and the Art of Physiognomy , Christoph Siegrist's Letters of the Divine Alphabet , Carsten Zelle's Soul-Semiology , John Graham's Contexts of Physiognomic Description , Katherine Hart's Lavater and late 18th-Century English Caricature , Siegfried Frey's Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face , C. Rivers's Balzac, Physiognomy, and the Legible Body , Graeme Tytler's Lavater and the 19th-Century English Novel , and Warja Lavater's When Signs Start to Communicate.

Using the nine novels of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) as case studies, Shookman explores the notion of fictionality both as a distinctive feature of the stories themselves and as a distinguishing characteristic of the fanciful notions, moral laws, political utopias, religious beliefs, and artistic concepts that they describe. The novels show readers why they should take fictions seriously, yet not literally--or how to suspend disbelief without suspending judgment.Shookman uses the concepts of imagination, ideals, and illusion to investigate how Wieland's novels define fiction, know its referents, and accept its truths. He places Wieland's use of fictionality in the evolution of the German novel, while also using his work to comment on academic and real world implications of fictionality.