The Images of Childhood and Adolescence in Stefan Zweig’s Works

Zhenzhen Chen

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian writer. He enjoyed a global reputation and was for some time one of the most translated writers in the world. There have been many studies on his wide-circulated later novellas and adult characters. However, the child and adolescent characters in his works remain understudied. My thesis aims to fill this gap in the Zweig scholarship, examining these “unnoticeable” characters in Zweig’s novel Clarissa and his early novellas. I will be interested in how his portrayal of childhood and his criticism of prevailing pedagogical conventions coincide with some new pedagogical ideas in the early twentieth century and how four chapters in Zweig’s autobiography The World of Yesterday offer intertexts for children and adolescents in his narrative works.