Kurt Kusenberg

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This pioneering study of the life and stories of one of Germany's foremost literary humorists establishes Kurt Kusenberg as an important author in the tradition of the fantastic. Pearson's structural and thematic analyses of the stories follow their trail through the worldviews of surrealism, the fairy tale, and the grotesque, and explore their fantastic elements. Investigating the history and reception of nonsense literature, Pearson shows how Kusenberg's use of nonsense and the fantastic facilitates a psychological probing of the «underside» of the human mind. An insightful and comprehensive introduction to a comic writer of high originality, Kurt Humorist of the Fantastic fills a major gap in the study of modern German fiction.