Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: Imagine Sisyphus -- Lost Worlds -- The Algerian -- A Salesman Called Schoenzeit -- Becoming Böll -- Beckett Climbs the Mount of Joy -- A Farewell to Vienna -- A Thin Slice of Bois de Boulogne -- Models of Daring -- Caligula and the Moon -- On Meeting Joyce -- Musil Traverses “Park Nietzsche” -- Sartre in Berlin and Bouville -- Norwegian Light -- Land, Stock, and Fringe -- Bohemian and Bauer -- The Grimace of Céline -- Simone Weil and Franz Kafka: A Forceful Parallel -- Ernst Jünger’s World of Fire -- Thomas Mann and Some Afterthoughts.

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In Interbellum Literature historian Cor Hermans presents a panorama of modernist writing in the ominous period 1918-1940. The book offers, in full scope, an engaging synthesis of the most stimulating ideas and tendencies in the novels and plays of a wide circle of writers from France (Proust, Gide, Camus, Céline, Tzara, Aragon, Simone Weil), England and Ireland (Virginia Woolf, Orwell, Joyce, Beckett), the USA (Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, O’Neill, Hemingway), Austria-Hungary (Musil, Broch, Kafka, Zweig, Roth), and Germany (Hesse, Jünger, Böll, Thomas Mann). Caught between world wars, they nevertheless succeeded in creating some of the best literature ever. They created a philosophy as well, rejecting bourgeois ‘mechanical’ society, designing escape routes from the nihilism of the times.

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