This book traces a longstanding concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Gunter Grass, Germany's best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass's tendency to insert clearly recognisable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction
to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterised Grass's relationship to this sphere and himself as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both
thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass's work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.
- ISBN10 0199542708
- ISBN13 9780199542703
- Publish Date 26 June 2008
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Oxford University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 210
- Language English