The author of the master thesis interprets the novel The Magic Mountain as an anthropological novel. This has not yet been established as a literary genre in literary studies, and its basic characteristics have so far been most precisely defined by Jutta Heinz, who focused on the period of Late Enlightenment. In addition to the literary genre, the author also examines the anthropological discourse at the turn of the 19th century, so that he points out that the anthropological novel of German modernism differs in some respects from that of the late Enlightenment. In addressing such a discourse, he focuses on ethnological, psychoanalytical, and linguistic crisis conceptions that play one of the central roles in the novel. At the same time, he places them within the perspectives of literary anthropology defined by Wolfgang Riedel.
|
