Major Figures Of Contemporary Austrian Literature

The fifteen essays cover the life and works of the major authors representing the generation who began their literary careers before Word War 2, were driven into exile or into inner emigration during the years of annexation (1938-1945), and attained full prominence in the post-war period.

Visions and Visionaries is an apt title for this volume of essays on contemporary Austrian literature and film, because this collection offers insightful discussions of a gallery of significant authors and cultural figures. It also investigates important issues of style and genre, and portrays questions of Austrian identity and culture in rich contexts of recent literary and multi-media developments, cross-cultural interactions, and historical forces. This book encompasses relevant trends and notions from the past - especially the complexities of lingering effects of the Nazi era - along with issues of the future - in particular the present and anticipated interactions of culture and cyberspace. The essays are enhanced by poems by Evelyn Schlag and Gerhard Kofler.

The purpose of this projected seven-volume series is to help make the major figures of Austrian literature from 1800 to the present accessible to an English-speaking audience. The introductions provide an overview of the cultural and political background of the age to furnish a broader context for the individual contributions. Bibliographies of primary and secondary texts enhance the value of the volumes as reference works. This volume covers the turbulent period between the two world wars. Despite the hardships endured by a country recovering from a severe war, and despite the prominence of politics, literature flourished to a degree that, surprisingly perhaps, makes this era one of the richest periods in Austrian literary history.

In response to the silence that continues to shroud Austria’s historical past, Austrian literature after 1950 wants to retrace an untold history that left its marks in mental schemata and cultural clichés. The question how literature can refer to the facts silenced by a political unconscious, the question of literary reference and reality description, lies at the core of Austrian literature since the 1950’s. This book traces the development of contemporary Austrian fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s, showing how the Vienna Group’s literary reductionism led to gesture of mere pointing in happening and performance. While strongly indebted to the experimental techniques of the Vienna Group, later Austrian authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Peter Rosei, and Gerhard Roth employ literary forms and extra-literary media prone to the indexical in an attempt to cut through the net of linguistic and cultural clichés, alluding to the microfascisms latent in common percepts, and indexing a reality that eludes plain description.

This collection of twelve studies of some of the leading Austrian writers of today, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, is ample evidence of a distinctive Austrian literary culture, even if its definition proves something of a chimaera. But are these writers high priests, enthroned by the established culture, or desecrators, angrily rejecting it? Some of the contributors to this volume unflinchingly assign their authors to one end of this spectrum or another, while others refuse even to entertain such a provocative schematization. 'The essays in this collection offer a good impression of the formal and thematic range of contemporary Austrian literature and include substantial pieces on Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek, Fried and Mitgutsch, while other contributions reveal the special quality of more idiosyncratic and marginal figures. Editors and contributors wisely avoid attempting to deduce from this variety a distinctive Austrian quality common to these authors, but they are where appropriate aware of the provocation some of them represent in an Austrian context' (Forum for Modern Language Studies).

This volume covers the turbulent period between the two world wars. Despite the hardships endured by a country recovering from a severe war, and despite the prominence of politics, literature flourished to a degree that, surprisingly perhaps, makes this era one of the richest periods in Austrian literary history.

This volume presents fifteen of the leading authors of the Austrian nineteenth century. A comprehensive introduction provides the historical and literary background as a context for the essays on the individual writers. Special attention is paid to the definition of Biedermeier, to the attitudes toward women, and to the question of the autonomy of Austrian literature.Authors discussed are: Ludwig Anzengruber, Eduard Bauernfeld, Jakob Julius David, Karl Emil Franzos, Franz Grillparzer, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Ferdinand Kurnberger, Nikolaus Lenau, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Betty Paoli, Caroline Pichler, Ferdinand Raimund, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Charles Sealsfield, Adalbert Stifter.