Recognised as one of post-war Germany's most idiosyncratic and notorious novelists, Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) was both an eccentric literary innovator and provocative literary historian. Although his works make no concessions to the general reader, Schmidt has proved astonishingly popular, challenging the assumptions of many critics that he was a quixotic elitist devoid of a wider audience.
This volume is the only study in either English or German to chart the field of Schmidt criticism comprehensively since 1970. Focusing on the ways in which critics have attempted to `frame' their subject, and taking modern literary theory into account, the author provides a thematic outline of Schmidt criticism as well as critical analyses of the scholarship on selected works.