Todd Kontje
Formative Fictions should appeal to multiple academic audiences. Anyone interested in the genre of the Bildungsroman will want to read Tobias Boes's work. What elevates the book above individual genre studies, however, is its effort to redefine comparative literature as world literature. Boes does this in a very careful way, steering between the Scylla of nationalist essentialism and the Charybdis of an empty universalism. That is, he recognizes the importance of national and linguistic difference, but demonstrates how the national is caught between the global and the local, how the cosmopolitan can coincide with the national, and how the novels express the 'synchronicity of the non-synchronous' in the societies from which they emerged.
From the Publisher
Tobias Boes's outstanding transnational study... presents great insights into how Mann came to acquire a canonical status among both American and global Anglophone readerships. Boes successfully documents the course of politicization of a once self-proclaimed non-political man, who... comes to understand the significance of books as weapons in the war against Fascism. Rather than portraying Mann as the perfect world literary author, Boes remains aware of Mann's problematic political stances on issues of anti-Semitism and race, thus underlining the tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies that also entail the evaluation of an author in the world literary space.
Jeffrey L. Sammons
In Formative Fictions Tobias Boes seeks a new perspective on the perennial topic of the Bildungsroman, to relieve it of its traditional understanding as a national form, sometimes regarded as peculiar to Germany. Boes places the form in a context of increasing historical awareness and finds cosmopolitan sensibilities between nationalism and individualism that, drawing on Homi Bhabha's 'vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ allow comparisons of texts across literatures.
