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VIENNA PASSION is the autobiography of Rosa, a chambermaid, royal mistress and murderess, whose life mirrors all the sordid glamour of Vienna at the turn of the century. It is interleaved with the story of a tentative romance: that of Magnolia, a young New Yorker, and her singing-teacher in Vienna. Despite her lover's hypochondria and mother-fixation, however, Magnolia is just as much her own woman as Rosa ever was. More so, indeed, than either woman could ever have imagined.
Written with pace, humor, and startling literary allusion, Lilian Faschinger's novel is the story of the sensual Magdalena, who, disguised in a nun's habit, kidnaps a priest at gunpoint and drives him in the sidecar of her Puch motorbike to a remote forest clearing where she ties him to a tree. What she is about to confess to him is profoundly shocking: All Magdalena wanted was to find true love. What she found instead was a string of lovers who each made the fatal mistake of disappointing her. From a Latin dance instructor who uses a metronome to help him keep his rhythm in bed to a Ukrainian who plays mental chess games at the gravesite of former grandmaster Alexander Alekhine, Magdalena's men all lost their lives when they no longer satisfied her; perishing by her hand through poison, drowning, and incineration.A head-on collision between Church and sex, Magdalena the Sinner interweaves highly charged erotica with modern views on Catholicism, feminism, and the tensions between men and women.
Women in German Yearbook is a refereed publication that presents a wide range of feminist approaches to all aspects of German literary, cultural and language studies, including pedagogy. Each issue contains critical studies on the work, history, life, literature and arts of women in the German-speaking world, reflecting the interdisciplinary perspectives that inform feminist German studies.Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres is a professor of German at the University of Minnesota. Patricia Herminghouse is Fuchs Professor emerita of German Studies at the University of Rochester.
VIENNA PASSION is a novel of love, mistresses and music. It tells the story of Rosa, a chambermaid, royal mistress and murderess, whose life mirrors all the sordid glamour of Vienna at the turn of the century. Rosa's story is interleaved with another woman's tentative romance: that of Magnolia, a young New Yorker, and her singing-teacher in Vienna. Despite her lover's hypochondria and mother-fixation, however, Magnolia is just as much her own woman as Rosa ever was. More so, indeed, than either woman could ever have imagined.
"Nostalgia After Nazism is a compelling, sophisticated entry in the growing field of German and Austrian memory studies. It introduces into German studies a nuanced set of tools drawn from the broad panoply of contemporary theory and sets those voices onto the broader historical landscape of post-World War II confrontations between the West's recent history and its present. The result is a highly readable, impeccably documented volume that joins the best of literary history and close readings to a broad spectrum of theoretical models. Nostalgia After Nazism offers an exemplary model for cultural scholarship after the supposed ̀end of theory,' recapturing how theory, history, and the texts of culture are mutually illuminating."---Katherine Arens, The University of Texas at Austin --
Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history. Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist. Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.
Brings to light unsuspectedly rich sources of humor in the works of prominent nineteenth-century women writers. Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularlyon women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor an...
Studies of one of the foremost 20c Austrian writers, as a critic and as a novelist and dramatist. The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is The Death of Virgil, a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, akind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass psychol...
From a symposium at the University of California, Riverside, in 1997. Contributions in German were published as a special issue of Modern Austrian literature, 31, 3/4, 1998; English contributions are contained in this volume. Twenty-one essays consider the national image of Austria, both historically and in the current period. They examine the view of Austria projected in the writings of American, Austrian, and German authors, ranging from the late 19th century to the present. Attention is given to factors such as the country's natural beauty, the tradition of the monarchy, and pressing political and social problems. Name index only. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR