Brussels 1900 Vienna: Networks in Literature, Visual and Performing Arts, and Other Cultural Practices

This co-edited volume offers new insights into the complex relations between Brussels and Vienna in the turn-of-the-century period (1880-1930). Through archival research and critical methods of cultural transfer as a network, it contributes to the study of Modernism in all its complexity.
Seventeen chapters analyse the interconnections between new developments in literature (Verhaeren, Musil, Zweig), drama (Maeterlinck, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), visual arts (Minne, Khnopff, Masereel, Child Art), architecture (Hoffmann, Van de Velde), music (Schönberg, Ysaÿe, Kreisler, Kolisch), as well as psychoanalysis (Varendonck, Anna Freud) and café culture. Austrian and Belgian artists played a crucial role within the complex, rich, and conflictual international networks of people, practices, institutions, and metropoles in an era of political, social and technological change and intense internationalization.

Contributors: Sylvie Arlaud, Norbert Bachleitner, Anke Bosse, Megan Brandow-Faller, Alexander Carpenter, Piet Defraeye, Clément Dessy, Aniel Guxholli, Birgit Lang, Helga Mitterbauer, Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Silvia Ritz, Hubert Roland, Inga Rossi-Schrimpf, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Guillaume Tardif, Hans Vandevoorde.

Piet Defraeye, Ph.D. (1994, University of Toronto), Professor Performance Studies (U of Alberta). Publishes on contemporary performance (including Handke and Jeliniek) and directs for the stage. His current research project is on the figure of Patrice Lumumba in cultural discourse.

Helga Mitterbauer, Ph.D. (2000, University of Graz), professor of German literature at the Université libre de Bruxelles who has published monographs, volumes, and articles on German/Austrian literature, including Crossing Central Europe (co-ed., 2017).

Chris Reyns-Chikuma, Ph.D. (2000, University of Colorado), is a Professor of French Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta (Canada). He has published a book on Neo-japonisme, edited another one on Glénat and written over 50 articles, recently mostly on comics cultures.