This dissertation examines the role of the literary in the contradictory political experiences of three authors. I argue that Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, and Manès Sperber create a literary language that speaks about a type of political abuse and betrayal that the ideologies o…
Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy can be seen at work in the texts of canonical modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, William B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, and it is in the balance of these two …
In this dissertation, I examine the effect of forms of historical narratives on citizenship policies, paying special attention to the degree and the terms of inclusion of ethnic minorities. I focus on two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria. I develop a framework of…
This Dissertation examines the early, pre-Marxist years of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement from a wider perspective of European intellectual and cultural history. The movement originated in the Habsburg province of eastern Galicia around 1911 and was founded in Vienna in 1916. D…
My thesis focuses on the issue of problematic faith in the works of Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, and Edmond Jabès. I suggest that these three authors are primarily concerned with finding, and promoting through the medium of literature, a viable means of faith in light of the spiritu…
I examine how three European women used the people of the Middle East to construct their selves in response to the constraints of religion and gender in their societies. Harriet Martineau (Eastern Life: Present and Past, 1846) was a Unitarian, but embraced atheism. In the Middle…
In the process of defining the Self, cultural, ethnic or religious differences often serve to mark the boundaries of identity. One preeminent example of the interplay between images of Other and Self can be observed in the relationship of Europe to the Orient. However, European …
This dissertation explores how complexities of Austrian identity are navigated within spaces of Egypt through gendered representations of travel during the latter half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I examine Ingeborg Bachmann's…
This document examines compositions by Johann Strauss Jr., related by title or compositional circumstance to Hungarians or Gypsies, for the presence of the style hongrois, or Hungarian style—an exotic style used by Western composers throughout the nineteenth century. This study …
Programmatic content and associated instrumental idioms are examined in four works for solo oboe: Benjamin Britten's Six Metamorphoses After Ovid, op. 49, Henri Tomasi's Évocations , Tina Nicholson's Moments from Women, and Helmut Schmidinger's Vier gefiederte Worte des Odysseus…
Ethnic minorities are an invisible segment in Austrian society yet are perceived as a problem. To date, there are not many literary texts that represent them. In addition, Austrian literary criticism virtually ignores the few texts that deal with this significant part of Austria…
While Mozart wrote most of his greatest piano concertos after his move to Vienna in 1781, his career as a composer of concertos actually began much earlier. During the late 1760s and early 1770s, Mozart arranged sonata movements by other composers as concertos, and from 1773 to …
The Bosnian Crisis of 1908 was a crucial turning point in European diplomacy that produced many of the conditions that contributed to World War I. Austria's motives in annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be understood without assessing Vienna's relations with Serbia. Consequently…
Although many historians consider Joseph II's campaign of 1788 against the Ottoman Turks a failure, no one has yet provided a thorough account of it. This study attempts to put something into the void. Based mostly on original sources found in the Kriegsarchiv (War Archives) in …
This dissertation examines the determinants of states' foreign policy. In particular, it looks at core successor states to empires and argues that domestic institutions that regulate political competition are critical for understanding when a state is likely to pursue an aggress…
This dissertation explores issues in modern and postmodern literature involving culture and the struggle of marginalized voices to find identity. Through their emphasis on change, literal metamorphoses reveal much about modern literary criticism and culture. The substitution of …
The ‘Third Balkan Wars’—as the sequence of wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia is sometimes referred to in the vast sociological, political, and journalistic body of works published since 1991—took place in a ‘new’, post-1989 Europe that was haunted by feelings of fear and ins…
In this dissertation I explore the relationship between women, the state, and religious institutions in western Austria---the most conservative part of the country. The fall of the Iron Curtain triggered widespread fears of massive migration flows from Eastern Europe, and create…
This study analyzes the work of Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers founded by Holocaust survivors in Europe in the years 1943-1953. It considers the cases of France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy in comparative perspective. As a grassroots initiative t…