Austria was not the only European country whose old order disintegrated in the early twentieth century, giving way to the crisis of modernity, nor the only country whose literature bears the marks of this crisis. But modernity's onset was experienced differently in Austria: in the words of Karl Kraus, it served as -laboratory for the fall of world civilization.- This book examines the crisis as reflected in fiction written by Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Ingeborg Bachmann between 1920 and 1970. After examining the elusive concept of modernity, Malcolm Spencer looks at the responses of the...
Austria was not the only European country whose old order disintegrated in the early twentieth century, giving way to the crisis of modernity, nor the...