Lilian R. Furst is Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"By juxtaposing paradigmatic texts Furst succeeds in shedding new light with surprising insights. Intellectually important is her focus on ironic discourse along with the close attention she pays to the shifting of perspectives from the narrator to his characters and the reader. She masters the art of close reading as few scholars do nowadays without being tempted to construct a text of their own. It is a thrill for this reader to see with how much ingenuity she negotiates various challenges of her text. "I like her no-nonsense approach as much as her selection of paradigmatic texts and her well-rounded presentation of the material linked by the metaphor of 'the lens' and'green glasses' as well as the return to the same texts in different contexts. Everything is superbly argued and written. Furst's scholarship is impeccable, and is well versed in the latest debate on methodology (Barthes, Lacan, Bakhtin)." — Gerhart Hoffmeister

• Acknowledgments In Lieu of a TheoryI. IMAGES THROUGH THE LENS 1. Goethe's Italienische Reise in its European Context 2. "Paris Change!": Perception and Narration 3. Reading "Nasty" Great BooksII. KLEIST: "THROUGH GREEN SPECTACLES" 4. Assent and Resistance in Die Marquise von O — and Der Tod in Venedig 5. Through Multiple Lenses: Ironies in Kleist's Die Marquise von O — 6. Reading Kleist and KafkaIII. MIRROR IMAGES? 7. Realism and its "Code of Accreditation" 8. The Game of the Name 9. Not So Long Ago: Historical Allusion in Realist Fiction 10. Rereading Buddenbrooks Notes Index