Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Uneasy Alliance: Writing and Death
1. Kleist's Erzählungen: The Crisis of Meaning
2. Bildung and Mortality: Kleist's Search for a Poetics of Death
3. In Pursuit of Power: From "Honorine" to César Birotteau
4. La pensée qui tue: Balzac's Poetics of Thought
Notes
Bibliography
Index