| Abstract: | In a carefully orchestrated and nuanced consideration of four 19th-century German Romantic writers and three 20th century novelists, Mahlendorf offers the reader a rich psychobiographical feast replete with new insights into the intimate relationships of writers and their novella characters. The book is a textual and psychoanalytic study of the writers and their novellas, and is of particular interest to the present writer because of its chapters on the creative process. Mahlendorf takes a stance that can best be characterized as that of a participant-observer in that she is able to enter fully into both the novella author's life as well as that of its characters. For her, the novella becomes a kind of projection screen, akin to that of a Rorschach Test, on which, through careful analysis and intertextual rendering, the novella's creator lays himself or herself bare. In her expert hands, the author of the novella offers fictional characters central to the story's plot that emerge on her projection screen as essential aspects of the writer's personality. Focused for us, Mahlendorf's images take on almost a life of their own with a full range of psychoanalytic and literary allusions. The author examines the work from a historical, epistemic, and methodological point of view. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
