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This essay offers a comparative analysis of Arun Joshi’s  The Foreigner  and Thomas Mann’s  The Magic Mountain . Both novels present acclaimed novels of formation negotiating masculinity alongside experiences of diaspora and exile. It will be argued that comparing the two novels makes a worthwhile contribution to the genre discussion of the  bildungsroman  because it illuminates hitherto unexplored narrative connections between Indian literature and German exile literature. While at first sight the celebrated Indo-English novelist Arun Joshi and the German Literature Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann have only little in common, a closer look reveals that the two writers not only shared the experience of living in-between various countries, continents and languages but that both men were deeply concerned with imagining and narrating the agony of loneliness and alienation in an increasingly globalised world. Like Mann’s Hans Castorp, Joshi’s protagonist Sindi Oberoi grows up orphaned and spending his youth abroad. Whilst the two male protagonists have a professional background in engineering, their attempts to engineer their own lives get somewhat out of control when they engage in morbid love affairs. As if this was not enough, and like ‘true’ companions in fate, Hans and Sindi eventually have to come to terms with the deaths of their bosom-friends. Decay and death are thus central motifs in both novels. This is not only reflected in the vibrant representations of numerous places but is vividly displayed in the young protagonists’ detached views of life. Yet despite these similarities, the novels are also marked by differences in the way they construct and narrate masculinity, sexuality and transcultural existentialist identity formation. Hence, the emerging narrative panorama of the genre of the transcultural  bildungsroman  includes, in addition to a postcolonial and transcultural existentialist version, a homoerotic parody of the genre.

zeitschrift für anglistik und amerikanistik

The Transcultural  Bildungsroman : Education, Migration and the Construction of Masculinities in Arun Joshi’s   The Foreigner  (1968) and Thomas Mann’s   The Magic Mountain  (1924)