Grabovski, Ernst, and James Hardin, eds. Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries: Continuities and Discontinuities around 1900 and 2000. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. 240 pp. $75.00 hardcover. In the opening lines of this diverse collection of essays, Ernst Grabovski suggests the expansive approach of the volume, stating its aim show how the aesthetics of literature and its historical background have influenced each other and how they have changed during a (1)-a formidable task indeed. This interdisciplinary volume, which deals with topics ranging from the architecture and poetry to the politics and psychology of Vienna, questions the meaning of the term turn of the and its specific importance for the Austrian context. The ten articles use both contemporary and, to use Sander Gilman's words, not-so-contemporary literary examples to illustrate the overall progress and/or stasis that characterizes the political thought, social policy, and aesthetic theory in Vienna during the past one hundred years. In particular, the essays examine the way in which the city, through its simultaneously unified and fragmented quality, characterizes modernist and postmodernist thought and becomes the cultural signifier for beginning and end that the term fin de siecle implies. Both a tribute to and extension of Carl Schorske's highly acclaimed Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1981), this volume highlights the contradictory character that continued to modify the city at the end of the twentieth century, much as it did at its outset. The essays of this volume are bound together by their effort to reveal continuities and discontinuities in Viennese literature, art, and politics over the span of two centuries. The volume does not, however, provide an overarching thesis regarding the progression or stasis of Viennese culture during that time frame. Despite the somewhat open thematic connections between the essays and, in some instances, vague conclusions they draw, each of the authors provides a rich discussion of the culture and literature of Vienna and an excellent summary of aesthetic trends at the turns of the centuries. Janet Stewart opens the volume with an examination of literary depictions of the urban center and the connection between the city as an observable space and the individual within it. Stewart stresses the importance of the flaneur and seeing in capturing the essence of the city and analyzes the manner in which various authors, most notably Peter Altenberg and Peter Rosei, employ a kaleidoscopic method of collecting and sorting impressions in order to write the city (32). Rudiger Corner's essay expands the breadth of the collection with his discussion of fm-de-siecle poetry. He offers a provocative thesis, which perhaps undermines the very notion of a study centered on the concept of the fin de siecle, by arguing genuinely great poem represents a turning point in language independent from any turns of centuries (52). Through his examination of poetic language both then and now, Gorner raises the question of whether the language of poems stands above the ruptures of a century or if it embodies these very socio-cultural fractures. Dagmar Lorenz contributes a broad comparison of women's writing and its social and historical influences around 1900 and 2000. She concludes that women writers made much progress during the past one hundred years; much remains to be done by contemporary women authors, however, in order to reach their goals of global democracy, ethnic pluralism, and political progressiveness. …