About this book

Also published for the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London.

“…engagingly presented… a serious contribution to Roth scholarship.” Austrian Studies, Vol 15 (2007)

This is the first monograph on the work of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) to be published in English by a British-based academic, and should prove useful both to those with a specialized interest in Roth, whose novels and journalism continue to gain admirers around the world, and to those interested more broadly in an extraordinarily rich period in twentieth century European culture. It serves both as an introduction to the early part of a body of work whose variety and volume were for many years overshadowed by the reputation of the historical novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), and as a re-assessment of Roth’s writing, both of fiction and of journalism, within the modern tradition. A perceived fragmentation of social, political,cultural and other traditions was a particular concern for Roth, as for many contemporaries, and the thematic chapters present a detailed contextual survey of Roth’s intense and often ambivalent engagement with aspects of modern life, including travel, gender, technology, the city, and cinema. Besides assessing the continuities and discontinuities in Roth’s attitudes, these chapters examine how his responses to the contemporary world impact upon both the form and content of his writing. The author argues that Roth’s writing of the 1920s should be considered modernist not just in its often prescient sensitivity to cultural and political developments, but in its employment of a formal aesthetics and narrative self-consciousness which eventually made possible the illusory wholeness of the later fiction.

About the author

Jon Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in German. He has been a Research Officer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in Sussex and a Lecturer in German at King’s College London. He then joined Royal Holloway in 2003.