Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

Olaf Berwald · Stephen D. Dowden · Gregor Thuswaldner

ຕ.ລ. 2020 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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In his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)--one of the 20th century's most uniquely gifted writers--created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. His books never “tell a story” in the received sense. Instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, Austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the Second World War.

Yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since Bernhard's death in 1989. These explorers have found in Bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth.

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives examines the international mobilization of Bernhard's style. Writers in Italian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, English, and French have succeeded in making Bernhard's Austrian vision an international vision. This book tells that story.

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Olaf Berwald is Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Professor of German at Kennesaw State University, USA. His most recent book is A Companion to the Works of Max Frisch (2013).

Steve Dowden is Professor of German Literature at Brandeis University, USA. He is the author of three previous books, including Kafka's Castle and the Critical Imagination (1995), and the editor or co-editor of four books, including Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (2014; co-edited with Thomas P. Quinn).

Gregor Thuswaldner is Provost and Executive Vice President at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, USA. His most recent book is The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature (2017).