The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is The Death of Virgil, a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass...

The study examines how insights from scholarship in literary history and theory can be communicated through essays and reviews in the media. The broadly based essays are drawn from academic works on contemporary and exile literature, the classical and romantic eras, literary discourse on Europe, and critical analyses of modernity. The author argues for more intensive interplay between criticism, literature, and scholarship.