Austrian Studies

Available through JSTOR Current Scholarship Program from January 2012.

Now edited by Professor Florian Krobb (National University of Ireland Maynooth) and Dr Jon Hughes (Royal Holloway, University of London) this prestigious annual was relaunched by the MHRA in the autumn of 2003. Each volume has a coherent but broadly based theme.

Latest Volume

Volume 19 (2011) entitled The Austrian Noughties: Films, Texts, Debates is now published in print and online here.

It is far too early to determine whether the noughties constitute a distinct period of literary or cultural history with specific characteristics all of its own. It is, nevertheless, timely and illuminating to take a look at individual phenomena that characterize this decade. The articles in this volume discuss certain topical debates (for example surrounding the infamous Austrokoffer literary project, or the debates about pension provision and about religion), they identify emerging trends in Austrian film (the hybridization of genres and the use of the mock-documentary as political intervention), and they highlight new departures in literary expression (recent Romani writing and the rise of the multi-generational family novel). Other contributors to Austrian Studies 19 identify literary engagement with features of contemporary culture (the author as celebrity or the textual exploration of sound and image in the digital age). Finally, The Austrian Noughties volume does not neglect to probe new publications of established authors such as Arno Geiger, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, Christoph Ransmayr and Josef Winkler.

Online Archive

Archive issues from Vol. 11 onwards are now available at JSTOR to participating institutions.
Access online here.

Forthcoming Volumes

Volume 20, entitled Colonial Austria / Austria and the Overseas, will be published autumn 2012.

Format

Each annual volume includes a wide range of articles in English, together with a selection of book reviews, with the aim of making recent research accessible to a broadly based international readership.

Scope

The focus is on Austrian culture from 1750 to the present. Literature is considered in relation to psychology, philosophy, political theory, music, theatre, film and the visual arts.

'Austrian' includes the German-language culture of former areas of the Habsburg Empire, such as Prague and the Bukovina, as well as the work of people of Austrian origin living abroad.

Austrian interactions with other linguistic and ethnic groups -- the Jewish communities of Austria-Hungary, for example -- will also be taken into account.

Sample Article

A sample article is available here. Originally published in Austrian Studies 11 (2003), Lisa Silverman's article 'Repossessing the Past? Property, Memory and Austrian-Jewish Narrative Histories' considers the confiscation of Austrian-Jewish property during the Holocaust and its literary representation as a paradigm for examining the theoretical relationship between property and Jewish identity in Central Europe.

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Austrian Studies

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