The Deadalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years 1890-1930 (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought Translation Series)

Fantasy. The last years of the Habsburg monarchy saw a remarkable cultural flowering centered around Vienna and Prague: the music of Mahler and Schoenberg; the painting of Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka; the work of Mach, Freud and Wittgenstein; the poetry of Rilke; the plays of Hofmannsthal; the stories of Kafka. One concern common to much of this work was to attack the widely held assumption about the nature of reality and in this they prepared the way for a rich harvest of fantasy, especially in the short story and the novel. The Book of Austrian Fantasy explores this rich vein with examples of the major writers as well as of the acknowledged masters of fantastic fiction.