Perloff argues that, while Canetti won the Nobel Prize in 1981, ‘primarily for his famous sociological treatise Crowds and Power [1960]’, he too is in need of attention because the English translations of his memoirs ‘are all out of print’. As for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Perloff notes that he ‘is primarily known to his readers (most of whom are Anglophone) in English translation, although his aphoristic writings, from the Tractatus [1921] to On Certainty [1969], were all composed in German’. But this detail hardly places Wittgenstein in the same category of obscurity as Kraus. Perloff notes that: ‘The writers I discuss belong not only to the historical edge (the end of the Habsburg Monarchy brought on by the Great War) but also to its geographical edges: the distant provinces of Galicia (Roth), Bukovina (Celan and Gregor von Rezzori), what is now Bulgaria (Canetti), and so on ... [T]he only one of my authors born in Vienna itself was Wittgenstein, and he, like most of the others in my narrative, was Jewish and hence never a real insider in the fin-de-siècle Vienna of its aftermath.’

Again, Perloff seems to me to be overreaching when she attempts to include Wittgenstein in such company: the wealthy, assimilated, and renowned Viennese philosopher simply doesn’t fit into a grouping of writers who hail from ‘mutiethnic towns ... hundred of miles from Vienna’ and whose works are hard to come by in the English-speaking world. It seems that the philosopher must be included in this company since Perloff relies on a handful of his assertions and aphorisms to reinforce the key concepts explored throughout her book, whether Wittgenstein is properly from the ‘edges’ or not.

Perloff’s close reading of Kraus’s play The Last Days of Mankind (1918) – the least known, in English, of all the texts Perloff considers – amounts to a convincing argument for its contemporary relevance. Kraus’s play is, Perloff says, ‘part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract’. As with Kraus’s other works, Last Days dramatises ‘How information is disseminated in a world where truth is subject to the daily news cycle.’

Her analysis of The Man Without Qualities – ‘a fable whose moral is by no means clear’ as narrated by ‘an ironic and disillusioned observer who attributes to his characters motives that may or may not be conscious or even genuine’ – is cogent and engaging, but fails, strangely, to address the book’s key concern with geographical or cultural ‘edges’.

The essay on Celan is among the strongest. Perloff focuses on his distinctly regional ‘Austrian German, with its own much softer accent, its dialectic variations, idioms, neologisms, and compounds’, and argues that his wordplay is more comprehensible to an Austrian sensibility. Perloff’s interpretation of Canetti’s memoirs is comparatively strained: the textual evidence doesn’t always support her larger claims, and the insights gleaned through close reading often seem too tangential to the book’s core theses.

Karl Kraus (Wikimedia Commons)Perloff insists that ‘Closure was the enemy’ of Austro-Modernist artworks. Accordingly, Edge of Irony features a coda, but no conclusion; her primary method of argument is reiteration, rather than development. The book’s key assertion is that Austro-Modernist literature is distinct from its German contemporaries. In this, Perloff takes her cues from Ingeborg Bachmann, whose 1955 interview is quoted near the end of Edge of Irony: ‘The political and cultural uniqueness of Austria – which cannot be understood in terms of its geography because its borders are not really geographical ones – has been much too little understood. Poets like Grillparzer and von Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Robert Musil could never have been Germans. The Austrians participated in so many cultures and developed a different sense of the world from the Germans.’ According to Perloff, neither the revolutionary Marxism of Bertolt Brecht or Martin Heidegger’s ‘posttranscendental philosophy ... had much appeal to the ironic, satiric, darkly humorous, erotic – and often slightly mystical – world of post-imperial Austria’.

Since Weimar and Vienna are vastly different worlds, Perloff is surely right to argue that the habit of drawing false connections between them obscures the distinctive qualities of a literature that ‘developed in another direction, its hallmark being a profound scepticism about the power of government – any government or, for that matter, economic system – to reform human life’. Such scepticism is responsible for some of the richest literature, and certainly some of the funniest, of the early- to-mid-twentieth century.