The Viennese Cafe and Fin-de-Siecle Culture
ISBN: 9780857457653
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Berghahn Books
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.


Charlotte Ashby is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. In 2008 she curated the exhibition "Vienna Café 1900" at the Royal College of Art and co-convened the conference "The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange."

Tag Gronberg, is a Reader in the History of Art and Design and a Tutor for Postgraduate Research in the Department of Art History, Birkbeck, University of London.

Simon Shaw-Miller is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London. His publications include: Visible Deeds of Music: Music and Art from Wagner to Cage (Yale University Press 2002), Samuel Palmer Revisited (co-edited, Ashgate 2010) and Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Ashgate 2013). He won the Prix Ars Electronica Media.Art.Research Award in 2009.

Charlotte Ashby is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Birkbeck, University of London and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Viennese Café Project at the Royal College of Art. In 2008 she curated the exhibition "Vienna Café 1900" at the Royal College of Art and co-convened the conference "The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange."

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