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This collection of 12 articles, published in honour of Professor Martina Lauster, examines patterns of knowledge in the nineteenth century in German literature, visual arts, science and culture, as well as in comparative studies and English. The articles, written in English and German, reflect Martina Lauster’s wide interdisciplinary research interests, which run from 1800 to the beginning of the 20th century, and her special focus on the Vormärz period. Contents: Alexander von Humboldt and Flaubert – Reisende Frauen des Vormärz schildern Paris – Kleists Körperdarstellungen – Calderón and E. T. A. Hoffmann – Gutzkows ästhetische Verfahrensweise – Ernst Dronke’s Berlin – Gothicised place and globalised space in Victorian Cornwall – Austrian military newspapers after 1868 – Ernst Steiger in Amerika – German theories of visual knowledge – Georg Hermanns Biedermeierwelt – Developments in the Romanian Banat.

This collection of twelve studies of some of the leading Austrian writers of today, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, is ample evidence of a distinctive Austrian literary culture, even if its definition proves something of a chimaera. But are these writers high priests, enthroned by the established culture, or desecrators, angrily rejecting it? Some of the contributors to this volume unflinchingly assign their authors to one end of this spectrum or another, while others refuse even to entertain such a provocative schematization. 'The essays in this collection offer a good impression of the formal and thematic range of contemporary Austrian literature and include substantial pieces on Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek, Fried and Mitgutsch, while other contributions reveal the special quality of more idiosyncratic and marginal figures. Editors and contributors wisely avoid attempting to deduce from this variety a distinctive Austrian quality common to these authors, but they are where appropriate aware of the provocation some of them represent in an Austrian context' (Forum for Modern Language Studies).