Annotation
The aim of the subject is to acquaint students with the development of Austrian literature in the 19th century, from the period of the famous Viennese Folk Theater to the beginning of the next major world-renowned period of Austrian literature in the period of Viennese Modernism. Austrian literature, in its different direction from German literature, was most influenced by the period of Enlightenment Josephinism, to which the introductory lecture is dedicated.
Austrian literature did not go through the period of classicism and romanticism, which fundamentally shaped the neighboring German literature, instead it expanded the Baroque-Enlightenment traditions, especially in lyric and drama. Its highlight is the Vienna Folk Theater with its main actors Raimund and Nestroy, which significantly shaped the Austrian literary 19th century.
Alongside them, the Baroque and Enlightenment tradition shaped the founder of national Austrian literature, Franz Grillparzer. Parallel to the folk theater, the literature of the Austrian Biedermeier developed in the unfree Metternich era, culminating in the prose work of the great 19th-century European novelist Adalbert Stifter.
While in the German environment literature is liberalized and politicized in the Junges Deutschland movement and in the political lyrics of the 1840s, this direction is suppressed in Austria and its representatives regularly seek refuge abroad (Nikolaus Lenau, Anastasius Grün). In the liberal era of the Austrian monarchy after 1860, realist tendencies grew stronger in literature, influenced as in Germany by apolitical poetic realism, but with a typically Austrian tendency to psychologize realistic heroes (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Ferdinand von Saar, Jakob Julius David, later Peter Rosegger ).
An interesting feature of this period of Austrian literature is the fact that the vast majority of excellent authors came from Bohemia or Moravia. Realism culminates in the naturalistic work of Ludwig Anzengruber, which closes the period before the beginning of Viennese Modernism.