Major Figures Of Modern 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.

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.

Essays that focus specifically on major Austrian writers and the influence of their work on German literature as a whole.

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.

For decades postwar Austrian literature has been measured against and moulded into a series of generic categories and grand cultural narratives, from nostalgic ‘restoration’ literature of the 1950s through the socially critical ‘anti-Heimat’ novel to recent literary reckonings with Austria’s Nazi past. Peering through the lens of film adaptation, this book rattles the generic shackles imposed by literary history and provides an entirely new critical perspective on Austrian literature. Its original methodological approach challenges the primacy of written sources in existing scholarship and uses the distortions generated by the shift in medium as a productive starting point for literary analysis. Five case studies approach canonical texts in post-war Austrian literature by Gerhard Fritsch, Franz Innerhofer, Gerhard Roth, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Schindel, through close readings of their cinematic adaptations, concentrating on key areas of narratological concern: plot, narrative perspective, authorship, and post-modern ontologies. Setting the texts within the historical, cultural and political discourses that define the ‘Alpine Republic’, this study investigates fundamental aspects of Austrian national identity, such as its Habsburg and National Socialist legacies.

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.

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.