Katherine Arens

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.

Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State

Vienna's Dreams of Europe

Case studies looking at how literature crosses national and cultural boundaries.

Reading Culture

Austria and Other Margins

Jorun B. Johns

Despite her wide-ranging literary production (spanning award-winning plays and novels, plays that unleash major theater scandals, screenplays, and many other genres), which has escalated her to the forefront of the Austrian literary scene, Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) is still scarcely known to the English-speaking world. To date, only three of her books, The Piano Teacher (1988), Wonderful Wonderful Times (1990), and Lust (1992) have been translated.

Katherine Arens

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