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    Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
    Unavailable
    Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
    Unavailable
    Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
    Ebook352 pages4 hours

    Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

    By Marjorie Perloff

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler’s Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an “Austro-Modernism” that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.

    Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti’s memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notebooks and Paul Celan’s lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of  Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2016
    ISBN9780226328492
    Unavailable
    Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
    Author

    Marjorie Perloff

    Marjorie Perloff is the author and editor of twenty books, including Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy and 21st-Century Modernism: The New Poetics. She is a Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities emerita at Stanford University.

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    • 5/5
      Many wonderful insights about a fascinating period in history written with great clarity.