Wenn Wörter töten könnten
Axel Thormählens Literatur-Thriller Wenn Wörter töten könnten ist ein mit einer gehörigen Portion Satire angereicherter, spannender Roman, dessen Handlungen sich hinter den Kulissen des Literatur-Betriebs abspielen. Die verschiedenen Intrigen dehnen sich von Hamburg bis ins schwedische Universitätsstädtchen Lund, um auf der Insel Gotland ihre Auflösung zu finden.
Erschien Anfang Mai 2020 in einer Neuauflage bei JMB Verlag.
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The Ladislaw Case
This sequel to Middlemarch is also in a limited sense a sequel to Dickens’ Bleak House. While there is no need to have read either novel in order to enjoy The Ladislaw Case, acquaintance with George Eliot’s characters and Dickens’ Inspector Bucket enhances the reader’s pleasure in following the twists and turns of the plot and the tribulations of the characters.
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Here is a chapter from the book: [Ladislaw Chapter 23.pdf]
"Thormählen writes very well, moves the plot along, and keeps the tension at just the right pitch throughout. She does a particularly good job extrapolating Eliot's characters, convincingly making Ladislaw much less attractive than he is in Eliot's novel and revealing the implications of Rosamond's chilling egotism ... Thormählen ... has created an entertaining re-vision of a major Victorian novel [which] successfully extrapolates elements in [Middlemarch] that both illuminate and criticize [it]." George P. Landow, Editor-in-Chief, The Victorian Web.
'One of the pleasures of reading Imke Thormählen's murder mystery ... is that it works on two levels: even as it unravels the question of who committed the murder, the novel provides a thought-provoking sequel to George Eliot's Middlemarch. /---/ [It contains] ... strong narrative suspense, psychological realism, and a credible Victorian setting ... [I]maginatively and insightfully faithful to George Eliot's vision ... this novel ... reveals some of the hitherto untapped potential that lies latent in ... Eliot's novel and is, at the same time, a very good read indeed.'
Micael M. Clarke, George Eliot -- George Henry Lewes Studies, Nos. 64-65
'The characterization of the main protagonists in the story is generally consistent with that created by George Eliot ... Characters impress us or repel us by what they say. There is no difficulty here in recognizing their voices: the clear sombre voice of the disappointed Dr Lydgate; the excessively polite voice of Rosamond, so quick to criticize her husband and add to his sense of failure in his professional and social life; the irritable and yet self-critical voice of the young politician Ladislaw; the certain tones of Lady Chettam secure in her social position, correcting her sister "Dodo" and yet always caring for her ... If the reader has also devoured Middlemarch, he or she will be eager to meet old friends, to be reminded of some of the darker strands of that story, and ultimately, tense with expectations, excited to discover the murderer. We are kept guessing until very near the end and for most readers the revelation will be a real surprise.'
Ruth and Michael Harris, The George Eliot Review 44 (2013), 88-89
A Happy Man or Der Glückliche
Les Figues Press, Los Angeles 2008
http://www.lesfigues.com
Selected short stories by Axel Thormählen, bilingual edition (English/German)
The tales in this collection could hardly be more diverse where content is concerned, ranging from the Christmas story 23 December to the young love of Dyke Crest Lane No. 1. We also meet the Construction Worker who keeps interrupting our lives with his relentless noise, the ancient church servant Thomas who inhabits the cathedrals where we catch our breath, and the old woman for whom the only uplifting thing is the Water Tower which rises near her house. In the familiar Course of Things, illness, healing process, and death go hand in hand; the Happy Man knows that, too, whereas the Churchgoer is still searching for a monumental meaning in life. We’d better make use of our Visiting Hour even if things keep breaking into little pieces, again and again.
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781934254042/a-happy-man-and-other-stories.aspx
Book Reviews Blog
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show_comment/1594
http://skylightbooks.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-encounter-with-happy-man.html
http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2008_11_013686.php
http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/AxelThormahlenAHappyMan.htm
Interview with Axel Thormählen
http://www.theshortreview.com/authors/AxelThormahlen.htm
Eliot’s Animals
T. S. Eliot´s poems and plays are full of animals, from the alley cats of the early poems by way of the eagle, leopards, and unicorns in Ash-Wednesday to the birds in Four Quartets. Marianne Thormählen´s Eliot´s Animals takes you on a guided tour of Eliot´s bestiary, showing how the poet brought a rich variety of ideas about animals into his texts and invested those texts with layers of meaning derived from, for instance, Dante, Baudelaire, and the Bible. Eliot´s Animals is a book to dip into for the Eliot reader curious to see how a particular scene can be perceived with reference to the function of a particular animal image. There is no need to read it straight through -- but those who do will learn something new about Eliot´s range and subtlety in handling symbolic features. (Lund Studies in English No. 70, 1984; 197 pp.)
The Waste Land a Fragmentary Wholeness
T. S. Eliot is felt by many to have been the poet of the twentieth century, and his famous The Waste Land is the best known poem of that century in English. Many people have found it hard to come to grips with, though, and reading Eliot remains a challenge.
"A hoax", "tripe", a piece of "rhythmical grumbling" (the latter is the poet´s own description) -- is T. S. Eliot´s The Waste Land really worth all the attention it has come in for since its publication in 1922? Thousands of literary critics and scholars have been writing about it -- what inspired such enormous efforts? And will the new millennium gratefully drop it into semi-oblivion as a period piece belonging to the world of yesterday? You´ll know more about The Waste Land, and about Eliot, and about the way you yourself respond to modern poetry after reading Marianne Thormählen´s The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness. First published in 1978, it has become a standard work on the poem, partly thanks to its generous annotation and bibliography which have helped many students chart their own way through this challenging terrain. The book tells you about the poem´s gestation, Ezra Pound´s midwifery, metre and rhythm in the Waste Land, and the symbolic imagery that is such a powerful dimension in all of Eliot´s work. It also suggests ways of freeing the reader from the obligation to make it all hang together by working out a consistent "plan" or "structure". Let The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness help you form your own relationship with the greatest modernist poem, unhampered by preconceived notions and unworried by its alleged "difficulty". (Lund Studies in English No. 52, 1978; 248 pp.)
Rethinking Modernism
Around 1979, scholars adopted the term "modernism" as a designation for the radical changes that took place in Anglo-American literature in the early twentieth century. The concept lent prestige to works and authors associated with it, encouraging the development of a vast body of criticism while blocking academic recognition of literature to which it does not readily apply. In Rethinking Modernism, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2003 and edited by Marianne Thormählen, fifteen scholars of modernism subject the concept to sceptical scrutiny as they revisit their special areas of expertise. The general question they all face is not so much "what was modernism?" -- a familiar question -- as "was/is modernism?" Their results show that although "modernism" remains a useful concept under certain conditions, for them -- as for any reader of this book -- modernism will never be quite the same again.
The book ends with a 20-page bibliography of works on modernism in two parts, compiled by the editor; the Literary Research/Recherche littéraire reviewer called it "comprehensive and invaluable". Other reviewers have praised the book as forming a "both focused and vigorous" volume (The Yearbook of English Studies) and as offering noteworthy "considerations of category breakers and the construction of categories by the reception of literary works" (The Review of English Studies).
https://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/rethinking-modernism-marianne-thormählen/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781403911803
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