The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture

This volume forms a convincing starting point, in which the Viennese café is revealed as a key site of fin-de-siècle modernity and of several modern urban identities. One cannot but hope for a sequel - that is, an even more extensive volume but one that is just as carefully prepared with beautiful illustrations and very extensive footnotes. · Academia.eduAll in all, this work contains fascinating essays that indeed flesh out some of the intricate issues of literary life that lie behind a simple cup of coffee. The café was a place of refuge for many artists and writers; in addition, it acted as an active, lively, and, at times, boisterous place for political and social debate... For any course on fin-de-siècle Central Europe, this book will provide a necessary springboard into how and why intellectuals were so heavily invested in the modern times of the new century. · Journal of Austrian StudiesThe Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna 1900. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.Charlotte Ashby is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. In 2008 she curated the exhibition Vienna Café 1900 at the Royal College of Art and co-convened the conference The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange.Tag Gronberg is Tutor for Postgraduate Research in the Department of History of Art and Screen Media at Birkbeck, University of London. She was a member of the curatorial team for the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 (2006). She is the author of Vienna - City of Modernity, 1890-1914 (Peter Lang 2007) and Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris (Manchester University Press 1998).Simon Shaw-Miller is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London. His publications include: Visible Deeds of Music: Music and Art from Wagner to Cage (Yale University Press 2002), Samuel Palmer Revisited (co-edited, Ashgate 2010) and Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Ashgate 2013). He won the Prix Ars Electronica Media.Arts: Research Award in 2009.