The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians by Louis James

The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians by Louis James

A guide to understanding the Austrians that delves into the cultural curiosities and peculiar characteristics of this land-locked nationThe Austrian needs lots of persuading to have his traditions tampered with in the name of modernization and efficiency. He is attached to his sausage, his insipid beer, and the young white wine that tastes so remarkably like iron filings. He prefers the familiar, tried, and tested to the novelty, the latter almost certainly being an attempt by persons unknown to make money at his expense.Home life for the Austrians is a never-ending quest for Gemutlichkeit or coziness, which is achieved by accumulating objects that run the gamut from the pleasingly aesthetic to the mind-blowingly kitsch.In Austria detonating pretension is a national pastime. It has to do with attitudes to power that date back to an absolutist form of government and with the self-irony developed by people who were (or thought they were) more talented than the authority to which they had to defer.The paradoxical character of the Austrian mingles profoundly conservative attitudes with a flair for innovation and invention. This creative tension usually takes the form of official obstructionism to good ideas, but sometimes the other way round. For example, the population were outraged by Josef I's attempt to make them adopt reusable coffins with flaps on the underside for dropping out the corpses. (The Emperor was forced to retreat, grumbling as he did so about the people's wasteful attitude.)

Louis James is Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Modern Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He began his academic career in the University of Hull adult education Department, followed by a lectureship at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. In 1966 he left to join the newly established University of Kent at Canterbury, from where he took years out to teach at Universities in the United States, Africa and the Far East. His publications on Victorian and postcolonial literatures include Fiction for the Working Man (1963); The Islands in Between (1968); Print and the People (1976); Jean Rhys (1978); Caribbean Writing in English (1999), and The Victorian Novel (2006). More recently he edited, with Anne Humphreys, G.W.M. Reynolds. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics and the Press (2008).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781906042219
ISBN 10	1906042217
Title	The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians
Author	Louis James
Series	Xenophobe's Guides
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oval Books
Year published	2010-01-29
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable