The Child Woman in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Biró, Annamária (2019) The Child Woman in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Hungarian Studies, 33 (1). pp. 91-102. ISSN 1588-2772

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Abstract

The 20^th century witnessed an increasing interest in psychoanalysis and, in relation to it, sexual deviances. Vienna had an outstanding role in this interest because it was where Sigmund Freud worked, and where the psychoanalytic society formed by his disciples was also active. In his volume from 1905, entitled Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, he listed certain forms of child sexuality as sexual deviances. At the same time, the arts often represented the child body both in its innocence, but often also as a sexual object. I think that the publication of a novel which was perceived as belonging to the category of child pornography in Vienna in 1906 can also be seen as part of this process, although it has been discussed earlier independently from other cultural or scientific processes of the turn-of-the-century Vienna. My paper attempts to place this novel into the above detailed context.

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