A Study On Zweig's Biographies

Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish Writer, is famous for his novelettes, and went down in history with his outstanding biographies. The study on Zweig in China has been somewhat complete, but most ones focus their mind on his short stories and novels, while however, the research on zweig's biographies has not been fully and systematically.Zweig had a fancy for literature from his childhood. He began his literary career as a poet, who wrote aestheticism poems. After 1914, his writing style underwent great changes. He turned to the history, developed a unique historical view, and created plenty of biography and features of history. Zweig's biographies can be deeply and permanently impressed because of their deepgoing psychoanalysis, soul-stirring tragicalness, the test and option on historical materials, masterly forming "plot", and poetic language. Why the change occurred? This is the starting point of this thesis. To study zweig's biographies means to study the works, the author, and the form of biography itself. This thesis tries to take Zweig's biographies as a whole unit, on this foothold, expounds his creation motives, the selection of heroes, the relation between author and heroes, the relation between heroes and heroes, and how he decoded his heroes, how he created his biographies, how he performed his power as a biographer.This thesis can be divided into five parts:preface, the combination of times and art and passion, electrifying heroes, the coincide of history narrative and fiction narrative, and conclusion. The preface focuses on analyzing the present academic research status of Zweig's biographies, and the writing background and direction of this thesis. The first chapter, trying to explored Zweig's creation motives, has three parts to do the work through times, literature and personal reasons. The second chapter, which has four parts, analyzes the kinds of heroes in Zweig's biographies, and gives his heroes an orientation from the four perspectives:Heroes of times, Lonely heroes, Heroes fighting with demons, and Spiritual heroes. The third chapter focuses on the narrative technique of Zweig's biographies. In the three parts of this chapter, through the direction of narrative view, narration time and narrator, the paper analyzed how Zweig brought the historical and literary elements in his works into equilibrium. The conclusion gives Zweig's biographies a whole comment, while states the value of the studies on Zweig's biographies.With the help of the teachers and predecessors'research result, keeping a foothold in Zweig's biographic works, this thesis gives a preliminarily study on why and how he create his works, and what kinds of works he create. Because of the particularity of the biography, the study is not confined to the field of literature, and might has some cultural and practical significance, in the hope of helping the development of the research on Zweig's works and the biographic literature.