In the Shadow of Empire: Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann

The first book to consider together the responses of the great Austrian writers Musil, Roth, and Bachmann to the crisis of modernity.

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...