Diss.--Theologische Fakultät des Wissenschaftlichen Rates--Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1983.

Part memoir, history and forgery, this novel chronicles a child’s love affair with the violent expressionist paintings of Egon Schiele. The novel is written in switchback time and takes place in the 1960’s and the early twentieth century (1910-1915). An unnamed narrator and his Viennese circle of friends are trying to restore the history of the great painter when a mysterious man turns up at the door. Wilhelm Boehme claims to know more about Schiele than any history book. But what Boehme describes is not just a coming of age story but the unsettling process of history rewriting itself, tucking into its folds, parts of the narrative that are too disturbing for a culture. In this novel are real events mixed with fantasies; personal chronicles from real historians and institutional figures (Alessandra Comini, Werner Hoffman)—and fictionalized characters taken from paintings that still hang in our galleries.

This study suggests that Blake’s works can be understood as ‘conversion works,’ which seek to facilitate a broadly defined perceptual, spiritual, and intellectual conversion in the reader/viewer. This conversion is manifested in various ways in the texts, images, narrative structures, and style of Blake’s works. Part I discusses the genesis of the narrative of Blake’s own conversion and introduces critical discussions of the conversion narrative as a genre, showing how the predominant interpretative paradigm of the conversion narrative (as an autobiographical reportage describing a one-off experience) is challenged by the shapes that conversion narratives have taken throughout history, suggesting a broader definition of conversion literature. In Part II, I analyze Blake’s depictions of Christ in his illustrations to Night Thoughts in relation to eighteenth-century Moravian art, and the way in which they are later used in The Four Zoas. I discuss how Milton can be understood as a multilayered conversion narrative, how the manifestation of conversion in Jakob Boehme’s works might have influenced it, and how a related conversion is manifested in Jerusalem (1804-20). Finally, I show how Blake represents conversion in his illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book of Job, emphasizing the importance of vision and the inclusion of protagonist and viewer in the divine body. Together, these analyses show conversion as a gradually developing presence in Blake’s works, exploring the conversion moment as a way into the shared salvific space of the body of Christ for fictive characters, author, and reader or viewer together.