Exploring the divided self: Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and its critics

Abstract

Although Steppenwolf received little critical acclaim on its publication in 1927, it is now widely considered to be Hesse's most innovative and influential novel, comparable with Joyce's Ulysses, and becoming the most widely-read German novel of the 20th century. This study surveys the diverse critical reception it has provoked. Taking a chronological approach, Professor Richards covers the early criticism and the primarily biographical studies of the pre-war period, the mainly German-based explorations of important facets of the work in the 1905s, the massive expansion of scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, and the consolidating recent studies. He sets out to show that Hesse scholarship has tended to favour a biographical approach, prompted by the confessional nature of his writings, with a strong psychological and psychoanalytical component; and that newer critical methodologies have provided fresh insights and contributed to the controversies over the novel's form and structure, its mixture of different levels of reality, and the problematic interpretation of symbolic figures and events.