Journeys Into Madness

Gemma Blackshaw is Reader in Art History at Plymouth University. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded book on portraiture in Vienna circa 1900. She co-curated the exhibition Madness and Modernity: Art, Architecture and Mental Illness in Vienna 1900 (London and Vienna, 2009–10) and co-edited the exhibition catalogue.

“The chapters are of consistently high quality and, when taken together, nicely illuminate what Plumley calls the “rich interdisciplinary seam of madness and artistic modernity”. They unearth interesting linkages between the different disciplines and convincingly show the centrality of madness and “mad spaces” to a wide range of cultural expressions… fascinating interrogation of the borders, boundaries, and spaces of  madness and modernism at the turn of the century.” · German Studies Review“Beyond meeting its own expectations as delineated by its editors, this volume demonstrates extremely well the range of questions that remain to be explored regarding the cultural history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This achievement is an additional reason for its inclusion in advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars.” · Austrian History Yearbook “The essays, representing a variety of disciplines and approaches, contribute new ways to look at mental illness in the Austrian context…a valuable collection that provides insight into the way mental illness was understood and functioned at a particular time and place in history, topic that is still relevant for today and the future.” · Habsburg – H-Net Reviews

• Note on ContributorsIntroduction            Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine WieberChapter 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition “Madness and Modernity”Leslie ToppChapter 2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of MadnessSteven BellerChapter 3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s ViennaGavin PlumleyChapter 4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous DisordersNicola ImrieChapter 5. Travel to the Spas: the Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe 1850-1914Jill StewardChapter 6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size ZeroSabine WieberChapter 7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900Gemma BlackshawChapter 8. “Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying.” A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’sThe Man without QualitiesGeoffrey HowesChapter 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and Eyes of the MedusaLuke HeightonChapter 10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900Anna LehningerChapter 11. The Wuerttemberg Asylum of Schussenried: a Psychiatric Space and its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the OutsideThomas Mueller and Frank KuhnBibliography