Vienna's Dreams of Europe ─ Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State

Vienna's Dreams of Europe argues, via a sweeping literary and intellectual history, for a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europe's nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represent a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Today's Austrian writers confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary's multicultural heritage, a culture mixing various nationalities, ethnicities and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond.

To challenge standard accounts of eighteenth- through twentieth-century European imperial identity construction, Vienna's Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the eighteenth century construed their own publics as European. Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism, and working in different terms than today's theorist-critics of the hegemonic West.

Katherine Arens is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is also a Professor in the Center for European Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of five books, including Empire in Decline and Austria and Other Margins: Reading Culture. She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Plato Award from the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK.