Criticism & Theory, Movements & Periods, World Literature, Contemporary, Freemasonry 

In the eighteenth century, Freemasonry was a powerful social institution for the moral world and, as such, exerted an enormous influence on the literature of that century and those that followed. In Fictions of Freemasonry, Scott Abbott provides new insights into fictional works of German literature from three centuries, showing that many novelists used Masonic symbols, customs, and written and oral traditions as their intertexts. Abbott's introductory chapter sketches the history of Freemasonry through the eighteenth century and demonstrates that the sphere of Masonic influence was broad. Running through both history and fiction is a basic Masonic story, a ritual tale told in many ways but with recurring motifs. It is a story of esoteric education in the East, involving a symbolic ritual route that challenges with trials of courage and teaches through pedagogical architecture. A key feature is a secret society with the power and will to direct the affairs of an individual or a state. In both historical and fictional Freemasonry, two interconnected issues recur constantly: politics and semiotics. As told by some, the Masonic story reflects on its own ritual sign system. Both Schiller's Ghost-Seer and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (Apprenticeship and Travels), for example, examine esoteric and exoteric signs and the Masonic semiotic transformation from reality to symbol and back to reality. The story can also be fashioned as one of a frustrated democracy, as in Gutzkow's Knights of the Spirit and Mann's The Subject. Hofmannsthal's characters in Andreas succor one another in their belief and disbelief in the transcendent Masonic sign system. The Masonic story can be presented as myth, as in Mann's Magic Mountain, or as a mythicization of history, a semiotically effected will-to-power as decried in Grass's Dog Years. Abbott's thesis that novelists have depicted Freemasonry's political and semiotic systems and have found there useful analogies to art's own political use and signs permits substantial reevaluations and reinterpretations of major German novels. - from Amzon