The Naked Truth

In her pioneering book, George paints a new picture - with the body at the center - of a much-studied and often misunderstood epoch without shrinking from the dark sides and the 'naked truth'. Therefore George presents the body - and thus Vienna - as a place of pain and oppression, but also as a place of pleasure and promise. To use a Musil term, she exposes the body's sense of possibility. -- Austrian Broadcasting Corporation In this finely written and meticulously researched book, George expands our definition of Viennese modernism. Ranging across various art forms and media, she brings the high modernist narrative from earlier scholarship into dialogue with popular culture. We readers stand to profit from this enriched conversation, learning about an age no less biopolitical than our own. -- Fatima Naqvi, Yale University A sweeping survey of the primacy of the body in the Vienna modern, The Naked Truth demands a reorientation of our assumptions. This book will make a difference. -- Scott Spector, University of Michigan The Naked Truth offers a brilliant challenge to popular myths about fin-de-siecle Vienna. In its cross-disciplinary focus on the dissected, gendered, classed, and moving body in Viennese culture, it reads Gustav Klimt's famous icon Nuda Veritas as a purloined image: always in plain sight but consistently overlooked. By including noncanonical women and expanding the frame beyond the political divide of 1918, George gives us a supplemental and alternative genealogy of Viennese modernism. -- Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University