Though long associated with a small group of coffeehouse elites around the turn of the twentieth century, Viennese “modernist” culture had roots that reached much further back and beyond the rarefied sphere of high culture. In Comical Modernity, Heidi Hakkarainen looks at Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic urban renewal during which the city’s rapidly changing face was a mainstay of humorous magazines, books, and other publications aimed at middle-class audiences. As she shows, humor provided a widely accessible means of negotiating an era of radical change.
Reviews:
Fetheringill Zwicker, Lisa (2020). Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and theTransformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna. By Heidi Hakkarainen. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, vol. 23. New York: Berghahn 2019. German History. April 24, 2020. Advance articles. DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghaa029
Wingfield, Nancy M. (2020). Comical Modernity: Popular Humor and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth- Century Vienna. By Heidi Hakkarainen. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Central European History 53 (2) 2020, pp. 469-470.
Vari, Alexander (2020). Review of Hakkarainen, Heidi, Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna and Hödl, Klaus, Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siécle Vienna. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November 2020. URL:https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55290
Kessler, Samuel J. (2020). Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna by Heidi Hakkarainen (review). Journal of Austrian Studies 53 (3) 2020, pp. 97-99.
Eszik, Voronika (2021).Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth–Century Vienna. By Heidi Hakkarainen. New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019. 279 pp. Historical Studies on Central Europe 1 (1) 2021, pp. 249–256
Heidi Hakkarainen 