<p>The threefold purpose of this book is to arouse the reader's interest in excellent novels that have been neglected or misjudged or that deserve fresh exploration; to demonstrate criticism that seeks to share the wisdom and pleasure derivable from superior novels; and to show how such novels - in their loyality to the complexity of human experience - provide an antidote to the dangerous narrowness of dogman, ideology, and chic ideas.The novelists discussed in Fiction as Wisdom include the relatively unknown (William Hale White); the celebrated who are represented here by undervalued works (George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Mann's The Holy Sinner); the newsworthy with still fluctuating reputations (Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow) and the universally admired (Goethe, Dostoevsky, Gide). Exploring the novels for their wisdom as well as their artistic power, the author shows them dramatically testing attitudes- religious, moral, political- that are central to our culture. Of Professor Stock's earlier treatment of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Thorton Wilder wrote that 'you have pointed out beauties and structural elements that had escaped me.' A previous version of the chapter on Gide's The Counterfeiters was called by Henri Peyre 'one of the most acute studies yet presented.' Lionel Trilling wrote that the study of Hale White has 'grace, vivacity, justness, and wisdom.' Thomas Mann, Saul Bellow, and Mary McCarthy praised Professor Stock's analyses of their work- the last saying, 'It's certainly the best study that has been done on me. '</p>

Fiction As Wisdom

Literature & Fiction

Stock, Irvin

History & Criticism

Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

William Hale White Mark Rutherford: A Critical Study

Arno Pr

<p>This book gives new readings of Mann's novels that show how his obsessive subject--the artist-as-Thomas Mann--became a key to central developments of Western Culture: e.g., to the clash of principles that ended in World War I, to the psychic origins and permanent truth of the Jewish God-story, to the disturbing connection between the Nazis and the greatest of German artists, including Mann himself.The author shows how Mann's famous irony emerges not from nihilism but from a relish for human beings in their idea-defying complexity, and how this relish keeps his richly philosophic novels alive--and delightful--as fiction.</p>

Ironic Out of Love: The Novels of Thomas Mann

McFarland Publishing

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