First published in 2003 Consuming the Past covers pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola, and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siècle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a soci...

This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna.Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating th...

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism.The book centers on three main erasures—the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors ...

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted voca...