The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture: 16 (Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 16) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857457640 ISBN 13: 9780857457646

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2013

Synopsis

The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

About this title

Review

"Like a well-made Mélange, this volume is rich and satisfying." - Slavonic and East European Review

"Eleven highly stimulating articles, including several dazzling ones....one of the most constructive... treatments that the subject has ever received." - Contemporary Austrian Studies

"This volume forms a convincing starting point, in which the Viennese café is revealed as a key site of fin-de-siècle modernity and of several modern urban identities. One cannot but hope for a sequel -- that is, an even more extensive volume but one that is just as carefully prepared with beautiful illustrations and very extensive footnotes." - Austrian Studies

All in all, this work contains fascinating essays that indeed flesh out some of the intricate issues of literary life that lie behind a simple cup of coffee. The café was a place of refuge for many artists and writers; in addition, it acted as an active, lively, and, at times, boisterous place for political and social debate... For any course on fin-de-siècle Central Europe, this book will provide a necessary springboard into how and why intellectuals were so heavily invested in the modern times of the new century." - Journal of Austrian Studies

About the Author

Charlotte Ashby is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. In 2008 she curated the exhibition "Vienna Café 1900" at the Royal College of Art and co-convened the conference "The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange."

About this edition

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0857457640
• ISBN 13: 9780857457646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258
• Editor: Ashby Charlotte, Gronberg Tag, Shaw-Miller Simon