''Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture'' is a 1979 transdisciplinary non-fiction book written by cultural historian Carl E. Schorske and published by

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers i ...

Described by its publisher as a "magnificent revelation of

turn-of-the-century Turn of the century, in its broadest sense, refers to the transition from one century to another. The term is most often used to indicate a distinctive time period either before or after the beginning of a century or both before and after. Ac ...

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born," the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book is lavishly illustrated with both color and black-and-white reproductions of key artworks, referenced in the text which explains their relevance to the themes in question.

Synopsis

Partly reconstructed from Schorske's articles published in the '' American Historical Review'', the book is structured into seven thematically interlocking chapters. Each chapter considers the interrelationships between key artists with the development of psychoanalysis and what was — at the time — viewed as an end of history. In the 'Introduction' the author claims that the text was born from his desire 'to construct a course in European intellectual history, designed to help students to understand the large, architectonic correlations between high culture and socio-political change' (p. XVIII). In his view, Vienna was a peculiar cultural environment due to the late ascendancy and early crisis of its liberal middle class between the 1860s and the 1890s. This compression of the socio-political liberal hegemony provided the opportunity for a 'collective Oedipal revolt' against the liberal inheritance, promoted by "Die Jungen" (the Young Ones), spreading from politics in the 1870s to literature and art in the 1890s. The chronologically compressed and socially circumscribed character of the Viennese experience created a more coherent context for studying the different ramifications of its high culture (p. XXVI). The second essay, "The Ringstrasse, its critics, and the birth of urban modernism" looks back to explore the liberal cultural system in its ascendancy through the medium of urban form and architectural style ... but it looks forward too … to the critical responses on the part of two leading participants in it — Otto Wagner and

Camillo Sitte Camillo Sitte (17 April 1843 – 16 November 1903) was an Austrian architect, painter and urban theorist whose work influenced urban planning and land use regulation. Today, Sitte is best remembered for his 1889 book, ''City Planning According to ...

— reveal the emergence of conflicting tendencies, communitarian and functionalist, in modern thought about the built environment (p. XXVIII).

Popular culture

Schorske's work was one of the major references for

Selden Edwards Selden Spaulding Edwards (born 1941) is an American writer and educator. His first novel '' The Little Book'' was a ''New York Times'' bestseller. His second novel ''The Lost Prince'', a sequel to ''The Little Book'', was published by Dutton in ...

' ''The Little Book'', and serves as the model for a fictional book ("Random Notes", later edited and renamed ''Fin de Siècle'') written by one of the main characters, Arnauld Esterhazy.

References

External links

* 1979 non-fiction books Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction-winning works History of Vienna Arts set in Vienna 20th-century history books {{Austria-hist-book-stub