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

Zusatztext An interesting volume that demands readers' attention ? This study adds to the still-growing number of works representative of a resurgence in scholarly attention to Habsburg and Austrian literature! culture! and history that recognize their ongoing prominence and importance to Central Europe and Europe as a whole. Informationen zum Autor Katherine Arens is Professor of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published widely on comparative Austrian/German intellectual and cultural histories, most recently Vienna's Dreams of Europe and Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna (both 2015), and The Other Kant: Experiments in Embodied Knowledge (with Carlos Amador, forthcoming). She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Plato Award from the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK. Klappentext 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.A sweeping account and re-evaluation of Austrian identity, via literature, culture and history, from the Enlightenment to the present. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: Austria as a Challenge to Europe Section 1: An Austrian Imperial Europe Chapter 1: Letters to the Ruling Class: The Public Spaces of EnlightenmentChapter 2: Extending Europe's Enlightenment: Why Grillparzer Resists Weimar Chapter 3: Revolution from the Promp...

List of contents

Introduction: Austria as a Challenge to Europe

Section 1: An Austrian Imperial Europe

Chapter 1: Letters to the Ruling Class: The Public Spaces of Enlightenment

Chapter 2: Extending Europe's Enlightenment: Why Grillparzer Resists Weimar

Chapter 3: Revolution from the Prompter's Box: Rewriting Public Dreams of Political Morality

Chapter 4: Eclipses, Floods, and Biedermeier Catastrophes: Public Spaces in extremis

Section 2: At the Margins of Europe, In the Heart of Europe

Chapter 5: Hofmannsthal's European Revolution: Recapturing a Space for Common Culture

Chapter 6: Schnitzer and the Space of Public Discourse: The Politics of Decadence in Fin de siècle Vienna

Chapter 7: Kasperl and the Wiener Gruppe: artmann, Bayer and Handke

Chapter 8: A New Balkan Challenge: The Reemergence of Austria's Europe

Afterword: Austria as Europe?: The Art and Science of the Post-National Culture

Bibliography

Index

Report

Vienna's Dreams of Europe is a critique of familiar teleological readings of modern history, an attempt to provide a more nuanced understanding of regional public institutions and public spaces in Central Europe, and an exploration of distinctively Austrian approaches to the idea of Europe. Arens brings to cultural studies-and to German studies in particular-a complex picture of European history and culture, which challenges common assumptions about modern Europe since the eighteenth century, especially "the fiction of an emerging 'German' culture-nation." David Luft, Professor of History, Oregon State University, USA

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: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.12.2015
• EAN: 9781441170217
• ISBN: 978-1-4411-7021-7
• No. of pages: 344
• Series: New Directions in German Studies; New Directions in German Studi; New Directions in German Studies
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History