'Klaus Mann, Genre Theory, and the Queer Novel.'

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My research explores the intersection of queer and genre theories and 20th-century novelistic innovation through the novels of Klaus Mann, whose open homosexuality in the subcultures of the Weimar Republic and later experiences of exile present unparalleled scope for investigating changing identities in highly dynamic times. I will focus specifically on how we can define the 'queer novel', recognising the reciprocity of genre and identity, where developments in each facilitate developments in the other. This project aims to connect otherwise disparate disciplines across the humanities, expanding existing knowledge on how the development and literary expressions of identities are bound together, and how apparently isolated phenomena - queer identity and the novel - can in fact exist beyond themselves, within their interactions, and beyond the fields in which we categorize them.Existing critical literature addressing Klaus Mann and his work tends to follow a few key patterns. The most prominent of these is biographical, whether focussing on his own life story (see Neumann 1995, Thiel 1998, Schänzler 1999, Casaretto 2002, Kaiser 2015, Spotts 2016), or more specifically on the relationship between him and his father Thomas Mann (see Härle 1988, Malcolm 2003), or on that between Klaus and his older sister, Erika (see Chrambach and Hummel 1990, Hauck 1997, Weiss 2008). Elsewhere, there is a strong critical focus on his experience and literary representations of exile both within Europe and in the USA in the 1930s and 1940s (see Dirschauer 1973, Weil 1983, Hauck 1997, Siderova 2003, Schmidt 2003, von Lindeiner 2005, Utsch 2007, Kroh 2008). Whilst the occasional monograph or doctoral thesis branches out from these approaches, it remains true that Klaus Mann's work is viewed primarily in conjunction with his biography, and practically never from the perspective of an in-depth analysis of all seven of the novels he wrote across his lifetime.Klaus Mann's (homo)sexuality is often briefly covered in biographies of him. Very few pieces of secondary literature, however, treat his queerness as anything more than a thematic component in isolated examples of his work (see Härle 1988, Keller 2001, Nixon 2005), and, when they do, it is often with a pathologized vision of identity that sees his sexuality solely in relation to his mental health, drug addiction, and eventual suicide. My research posits the question of whether queerness can be seen on the structural, formal level of a text, beyond any thematic involvement, with Mann's novels acting as case studies. To address this question, I will investigate the extent to which the novel, rather than other forms, presents an opportunity for structural analogy to queer identities, via analysis of key works in genre theory that concern the novel (e.g. Bakhtin 1981, Benjamin 1936, Derrida 1980, Lukács 1920). Using these lenses, my study of Mann's novels will contribute to understanding how queer identities are expressed in literary forms, and how minority identities affect and are affected by their literary expression.