A Companion to the Works of Arthur Schnitzler: 1 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) - Tapa dura

Offering a genuinely interesting collection of essays on essential topics, this carefully edited volume makes a significant contribution to Schnitzler scholarship.... Clear exposition, careful analysis, and sound scholarship characterize all contributions. CHOICE

Lorenz's volume belongs in every university library and in the hands of any Schnitzler scholar. GERMAN QUARTERLY

Fifteen fresh and spirited essays.... A welcome vade mecum for the trip to Schnitzler that most Germanists and scholars of theatre will take. AUSTRIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER

Excellent and comprehensive edition...the present volume is a serious and well-selected contribution to Schnitzler scholarship and will be welcomed by scholars and students alike. MONATSHEFTE

This volume of specially commissioned essays takes a fresh look at the Viennese Jewish dramatist and prose writer Arthur Schnitzler. Fascinatingly, Schnitzler's productive years spanned the final phase of the Habsburg monarchy, World War I, the First Austrian Republic, and the rise of National Socialism, and he realized earlier than many of his contemporaries the threat that racist anti-Semitism posed to the then almost complete assimilation of Austrian Jews. His writings also reflect the irresolvable conflict between emerging feminism and the relentless "scientific" discourse of misogyny, and he chronicles the collapse of traditional social structures at the end of the Habsburg monarchy and the struggles of the newly founded republic. In the 1950s Schnitzler's powerful literary record assumed model character for Viennese Jewish intellectuals born after the Shoah, and his portrayal of gender relations and role expectations and casual sex are received with the same fascination today as they were by the audiences of his own time. Schnitzler remains a major figure in contemporary European culture, as his works are still widely read, performed, and adapted -- witness Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Schnitzler's Traumnovelle as the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In this volume a team of international scholars explores Schnitzler's dramas and prose works from contemporary critical vantage points, but within the context of Austria's multicultural society at a time of unprecedented change.

Contributors: Gerd Schneider, Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, Elizabeth Loentz, Iris Bruce, Felix Tweraser, Elizabeth Ametsbichler, Hillary Hope Herzog, Katherine Arens, John Neubauer, Imke Meyer, Susan C. Anderson, Eva Kuttenberg, and Matthias Konzett.

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is professor of German at the University of Illinois-Chicago.