In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps -- a community devoted exclusively to sickness -- as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

A study guide for Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. "The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. Acclaimed translator John E. Woods has given us the definitive English version of Mann's masterpiece. A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, "The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic.

Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries. But how do we, as unique individuals, subjectively experience time? The slowness of an hour in a boring talk, the swiftness of a summer holiday, the fleetingness of childhood, the endless wait for pivotal news: these are experiences to which we all can relate and of which we commonly speak. How can a writer not only report such experiences but also conjure them up in words so that readers share the frustration, the excitement, the anticipation, are on tenterhooks with a narrator or character, or in melancholic mourning for a time long-since passed, which we never experienced ourselves? Erica Wickerson suggests that the evocation of subjective temporal experience occurs in every sentence, on every page, at every plot turn, in any narrative. The Architecture of Narrative Time offers a new template for understanding narrative time that combines close readings with analysis of the structural overview. It enables new ways of reading Thomas Mann; but also new ways of conceptualising narrative time in any literary work, not only in Mann's fiction and not only in texts that foreground the narration of time. The range of Mann's novels, novellas, and short stories is compared with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in German and in English to suggest a comprehensive approach to considering time in narrative.