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.

1. Narrative worlds/image orders. An introduction to the text.- 2. Literary self-assertion and experimentation with form: The narrative beginnings.- 3. Experimentation and design: The plays, prose works and radio plays up to 1973.- 4. Rediscovery of subjectivity: Lines of development in poetry.- 5. Return to narrative and new subjectivity.- 6. Return to the beginnings of the ego and the promise of images.- 7. Re-establishment of the narrator in the return to tradition.- 8. Self-reflection and poetological sketches: The journals, sketches and notes.- 9. Transmutation of the self in writing.- 10. The experiment of remembering description.- 11. The fundamental other of poetry: Handke's double discourse on Serbia.- 12. Between drama and epic: The plays after 1989.- 13. The competition between word and image.- 14. Dialectic of history and revocation of modernity.- 15. Basic lines of Handke's reception in literary criticism and science.- Bibliography.