Death in Venice
15 Jun, 2023
800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous - and infamous - novella. Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession. It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach’s stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected.
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Guests
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Karolina Watroba No other episodes
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford -
Erica Wickerson No other episodes
Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of Cambridge -
Sean Williams No other episodes
Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield
Reading list
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"Der Tod in Venedig" and the Triadic Structure
Alan Bance (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 1972) Google Books → -
Approaches to Teaching Mann's Death in Venice and Other Short Fiction
Jeffrey B. Berlin (ed.) (Modern Language Association, 1992) Google Books → -
Global Intimations: Cultural Geography in Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kroger, and Der Tod in Venedig
Elizabeth Boa (Oxford German Studies, 2006) -
Fear of Form: Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig
Edward S. Brinkley (Monatshefte, 1999) Google Books → -
Critical Essays on Thomas Mann
Inta Ezergailis (ed.) (G. K. Hall, 1988) Google Books → -
"Myth plus Psychology": a style analysis of Death in Venice
Andre von Gronicka (Germanic Review, 1956) Google Books → -
Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature
Anthony Heilbut (Papermac, 1997) Google Books → -
Taboos in German Literature
David Jackson (ed.) (Berghahn, 1996) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann
Todd Kontje (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Death in Venice and Other Stories
Thomas Mann (trans. David Luke) (Vintage Publishing, 2001) Google Books → -
Der Tod in Venedig
Thomas Mann (ed. T. J. Reed) (Bloomsbury, 1998) Google Books → -
Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master
T. J. Reed (Twayne, 1994) Google Books → -
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition
T. J. Reed (Oxford University Press, 1996) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann
Ritchie Robertson (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books → -
The Psychological Reality of Myth in Der Tod in Venedig
Heidi M. Rockwood and Robert J. R. Rockwood (Germanic Review, 1984) Google Books → -
Tonio Kroger and Der Tod in Venedig: From Bourgeois Realism to Visionary Modernism
Richard Sheppard (Oxford German Studies, 1989-90) Google Books → -
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: A Novella and Its Critics
Ellis Shookman (Camden House, 2003) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m001mt6l
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mt6l
Auto-category: 800 (Literature)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous novella.