Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters

This book brings together recent essays by the highly regarded German literary critic, Hans Mayer. They are studies in alienation organized into three main types of outsiders—women, homosexuals, and Jews—as depicted in literature from Shakespeare and Marlowe to the present.

The women in Outsiders are Joan of Arc (as presented by Schiller, Shaw, Brecht, and Vishnevskii), Judith and Delilah (as heroine and vamp), George Eliot and George Sand, Lulu, and contemporary feminists. The homosexuals include protagonists of Marlowe's plays, Winckelmann, Platen, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Ludwig of Bavaria, Tchaikovsky, and the personas of Wilde, Gide, and Genet as seen in their lives and in their novels. The Jews range beyond stereotype from Shylock to Disraeli, the Rothschilds, Heine, Proust's Bloch and Joyce's Bloom, and Trotsky.

This English translation of Outsiders includes a new preface by the author.