The volume presents Handke's works from Hornissen (1966) to Das zweite Schwert (2020) in individual analyses and at the same time opens up overarching orientations of Handke's writing. The autoreflexive traces that characterise the author's experimental early work are perpetuated in a middle phase by a return to traditional forms of epic narrative and literary models that is philosophically influenced. In the late work, these approaches give rise to a comprehensive poetology of narrative that links all the texts together. In the process, previously developed motifs are condensed into overarching thematic complexes. Alongside the reality of war, the relationship between image and writing, text and film, social and media developments of modernity come to the fore. The reference of Handke's texts to images of the painterly tradition and visual strategies of his writing are given special weight.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Peter Handke by Rolf G. Renner, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.