The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass

New essays for students of German's best-known living author and his works, including The Tin Drum.

Stuart Taberner (Edited by)

9780521876704, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 July 2009

254 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.53 kg

Günter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have shaped post-War Germany: the difficult legacy of the Nazi past, the Cold War and the arms race, environmentalism, unification and racism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. This Companion offers the widest coverage of Grass's oeuvre across the range of media in which he works, including literature, television and visual arts. Throughout, there is particular emphasis on Grass's literary style, the creative personality which inhabits all his work, and the impact on his reputation of revelations about his early involvement with Nazism. The volume sets out, in a fresh and lively fashion, the fundamentals that students and readers need in order to understand Grass and his individual works.

Chronology
Introduction Stuart Taberner
1. Biography as politics Julian Preece
2. Günter Grass's political rhetoric Frank Finlay
3. The exploratory fictions of Günter Grass Patrick O' Neill
4. Günter Grass and magical realism Peter Arnds
5. Günter Grass's 'Danzig Quintet' Katharina Hall
6. Günter Grass and gender Helen Finch
7. Authorial construction in Günter Grass's prose Rebecca Braun
8. Günter Grass's apocalyptic visions Monika Shafi
9. Günter Grass and German unification Stephen Brockmann
10. Günter Grass's Peeling the Onion Stuart Taberner
11. Günter Grass as poet Karen Leeder
12. Günter Grass and art Richard Erich Schade
13. Günter Grass as dramatist David Barnett
14. Film adaptations of Günter Grass's prose work Roger Hillman
15. Günter Grass and his contemporaries in East and West Stuart Parkes
Guide to further reading.

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]