Modernity, horses, and history in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch

Niland, Richard and Murgatroyd, Nicholas (2016) Modernity, horses, and history in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch. Literature and History, 25 (2). pp. 150-166.

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    Abstract

    Exploring the subject of horses in Joseph Roth's best-known novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), this essay examines how Roth's experience of and response to modernity can be understood through his treatment of the equine. While horses constitute an important subject for Roth in the urban context of his journalism and early fiction in the years following the First World War, in which he offers a politically charged lament for the decline of the horse in quotidian European urban culture, Radetzkymarsch uses the equine to connect to both historical tradition and pre-modernity, while also sceptically interrogating Habsburg imperialism in its end days. Drawing on recent work in Roth scholarship, Austrian cultural history, and animal studies, this essay examines how the horse becomes a complex symbol not only for the decline of the Habsburg empire, but of the strain which modernity places on the values of the past.

    Author(s):Niland, Richard ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4931-5594 and Murgatroyd, Nicholas
    Item type:Article
    ID code:57970
    Keywords:Joseph Roth, horses, cavalry, modernity, equine, European urban culture, Literary History, World War II, History, Literature and Literary Theory
    Subjects:Language and Literature > Literature (General) > Literary History
    History General and Old World > History (General) > World War II
    Department:Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > School of Humanities > English
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:28 Sep 2016 12:55
    Last modified:10 Sep 2019 08:00
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/57970
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