Vienna's Dreams of Europe - Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State

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.

Product details

• Authors: Katherine Arens, Katherine (University of Texas At Austin Arens, Professor Katherine (University of Texas at Austin Arens
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.12.2015
• EAN: 9781441142498
• ISBN: 978-1-4411-4249-8
• No. of pages: 344
• Series: New Directions in German Studies; New Directions in German Studies
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies