Fin-de-siècle Vienna remains a central event in the birth of the
century's modern culture. Our understanding of what happened in those
key decades in Central Europe at the turn of the century has been shaped
in the last years by an historiography presided over by Carl Schorske's
Fin de Siècle Vienna and the model of the relationship between
politics and culture which emerged from his work and that of his
followers. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to question the main
paradigm of this school, i.e. the "failure of liberalism."
This volume reflects not only a whole range of the critiques but also
offers alternative ways of understanding the subject, most notably
though the concept of "critical modernism" and the integration of
previously neglected aspects such as the role of marginality, of the
market and the larger Central and European context. As a result this
volume offers novel ideas on a subject that is of unending fascination
and never fails to captivate the Western imagination.