The Confessional Imagination in Hermann Hesse's Major Fiction

FAIN: FR-10328-78

Eugene L. Stelzig
SUNY Research Foundation, College at Geneseo (Geneseo, NY 14454-1401)

To write a book on Hermann Hesse's fiction as product of his confessional imagination. Critics frequently note that his works, like those of Goethe, are fragments of a larger confession, but none have used this as an approach to his major fiction, although Hesse insisted that his novels were autobiographical, and that his leading characters were symbolic "incarnations" of his own self. Book will delineate the confessional content and form of his major novels, and to point furthermore to some basic similarities of theme and outlook between Hesse and some of the English romantics—Blake, Wordsworth and Keats.