Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural, and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travelers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers, and royalty to tourists...
Trade Review “The chapters are of consistently high quality and, when taken together, nicely illuminate what Plumley calls the “rich interdisciplinary seam of madness and artistic modernity”. They unearth interesting linkages between the different disciplines and convincingly show the centrality of madness and “mad spaces” to a wide range of cultural expressions… fascinating interrogation of the borders, boundaries, and spaces of madness and modernism at the turn of the century.” · German Studies Review
“Beyond meeting its own expectations as delineated by its editors, this volume demonstrates extremely well the range of questions that remain to be explored regarding the cultural history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This achievement is an additional reason for its inclusion in advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars.” · Austrian History Yearbook
“The essays, representing a variety of disciplines and approaches, contribute new ways to look at mental illness in the Austrian context…a valuable collection that provides insight into the way mental illness was understood and functioned at a particular time and place in history, topic that is still relevant for today and the future.” · Habsburg – H-Net Reviews
Table of Contents Note on Contributors
Introduction
Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber
Chapter 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition “Madness and Modernity”
Leslie Topp
Chapter 2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness
Steven Beller
Chapter 3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna
Gavin Plumley
Chapter 4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders
Nicola Imrie
Chapter 5. Travel to the Spas: the Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe 1850-1914
Jill Steward
Chapter 6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero
Sabine Wieber
Chapter 7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900
Gemma Blackshaw
Chapter 8. “Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying.” A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’sThe Man without Qualities
Geoffrey Howes
Chapter 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and Eyes of the Medusa
Luke Heighton
Chapter 10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900
Anna Lehninger
Chapter 11. The Wuerttemberg Asylum of Schussenried: a Psychiatric Space and its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the Outside
Thomas Mueller and Frank Kuhn
Bibliography
