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Since coming to public notice through major museum catalogues and
the work of Carl Schorske around 1980, fin de siecle Vienna has
been cast as the final bloom of a dying culture. Yet this
assessment is itself a historical construct, deriving from the
politics of the twentieth century. This volume argues that
"Habsburg nostalgia" is anything but backward looking: instead,
images from this glittering Habsburg past become evidence of a
culture's sophisticated sense of how and why history is made, in
both official and popular spheres. Including the first translation
of an original account of Crown Prince Rudolf's suicide at
Mayerling in 1889, Belle Necropolis argues for Austria's continued
reuse of its own history to point the way toward the future rather
than simply memorializing a past that only exists as living
memories of shared stories, not as a truth in itself. Case studies
included here range from imperial stereotypes before 1900 through
their adaptations in the film 1. April 2000 and today's musicals,
and from the politics of representing Austria since Rebecca West up
through Schorske's master narrative of the Ringstrasse. Through
these studies, Habsburg culture emerges as a culture of
commemoration that uses its own past to overcome the limits of a
small country seeking a role on the contemporary world stage.
New essays by leading scholars re-examining major aspects of the
work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great Austrian poet and
dramatist. The Viennese poet, dramatist, and prose writer Hugo von
Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was among the most celebrated men of
letters in the German language at the turn of the 19th to the 20th
century. His early poems established his reputation as the `child
prodigy' of German letters, and a few remain among the most
anthologized in the German language. His early lyric dramas
prompted no less a judge than T. S. Eliot to pronounce him, along
with Yeats and Claudel,one of the three European writers who had
done the most to revive verse drama in modern times. His critical
essays attest to the subtle powers of discrimination that marked
him as one of the most discerning literary critics of the day. And
yet he underwent a crisis of cognition and language around 1900,
and from then on turned away from poetry and lyric drama almost
entirely, concentrating instead on more public forms of drama such
as the libretti for Richard Strauss's operas, the plays written for
the Salzburg Festival (of which he was a co-founder), and on
discursive and narrative prose. The body of work that Hofmannsthal
left behind at his premature death is matched in its variety,
breadth, and quality by that of only a handful of German writers.
And yet posterity has not been kind to his reputation: those who
admired the early work for its aesthetic refinement disdained his
turn to more popular forms,whereas many of those who might have
been receptive to the more committed and public stance of his later
work were put off by his conservative politics. This volume of new
essays by top Hofmannsthal scholars re-examines his extraordinarily
rich and complex body of work, assessing his stature in German and
world literature in the new century. Contributors: Katherine Arens,
Judith Beniston, Benjamin Bennett, Nina Berman, Joanna Bottenberg,
DouglasA. Joyce, Thomas A. Kovach, Ellen Ritter, Hinrich C. Seeba,
Andreas Thomasberger, W. Edgar Yates. Professor Thomas Kovach is
Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of
Arizona.
Vienna's Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing
counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in
Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers
have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their
political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of
Europe's nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no
matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the
Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represented a globalized
European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of
nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited
Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary's multicultural
heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and
cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond.
Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century
European imperial identity construction, Vienna's Dreams of Europe
introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who
have since the 18th century construed their own public as European.
Working in different terms than today's theorist-critics of the
hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity
resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.
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Paperback
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R383
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Discovery Miles 3 100
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