The intention of this masters thesis is to examine how homosexuality is represented in Thomas Mann's 1913 novella Death in Venice, and to demonstrate how Mann was able to incorporate such a taboo issue in a story that Wilhelmine Germany would come to embrace. / The study consists of four chapters which examine four contexts in which the story, for the purposes of this thesis, should be interpreted. The first is historical, in which the previous reception of the novella, as well as the author's own struggle with his identity, is investigated. In the second, Mann's philosophical paradigms to represent homoeroticism, drawn largely from classical Greece and Nietzsche, are examined. Freud's views of homosexuality and sublimation furnish the basis for the third chapter, in which sublimated imagery of sexual desire in the text is considered. Finally, the narrative strategies employed by Mann that render the story palatable to his heterosexual, bourgeois reading audience are illustrated in the fourth chapter.

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