Alys George, a scholar of Austrian literature, art, film, and culture, has written a sweeping study of the body in Vienna in the era of 1890–1930 that saw an unusual collection of creative minds in arts, literature, and sciences. The book casts a wide net over several fields of cultural production and by doing so challenges the understanding of Vienna as the site of “homo psychologicus [psychological man] as the emblematic manifestation of Viennese culture,” launched by Carl Schorske in his classic studies from the 1960s and 1970s (3). George argues that “from its very origins, Viennese modernism was as attuned to homo physiologicus, the physiological human being” (4). Although the book owes methodologically to literary studies, film studies, art history, and dance history, among others, I review the work as an historian of the body. My competence limits my marks on the quality of George's analysis of literature, poetry, dance, film, and art. Yet, it is also here that the book moves beyond its disciplinary confines as a contribution to an emerging field of body studies. After a brief description of the content, I will return to this methodological contribution.

The book is divided into four major, thematically organized chapters that capture the anthropological and medical display of the body, the anatomical dissection and depiction of the body, the politics and public hygiene of the body, and the body in motion. Much of George's analysis is grounded in careful and nuanced reading of medical literature, conceptualization, displays, and practices. The first chapter is crafted around a towering Viennese literary figure, Peter Altenberg, whose interest ranged from the 1897 World Fair exhibit of the Ashantee people to a major literary work, Pròdrŏmŏs (1906). His life work and literary production serve George as the staging of the analysis of the wide interests in the body and its display in the Viennese public. The second chapter follows the same approach by carefully following the paths of individual writers and artists, yet it zooms into the interior of the body, the practices of dissection in public lectures and their representations. George goes into the work of Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Conrad, and Ödön von Horváth. Yet, increasingly her focus shifts to such women's voices as Marie Pappenheim, Adelheid Popp, Rosa Mayreder, Auguste Fickert, and Marie Lang. In all their work, the body and often its instrumentalization to medical and industrial gain played a pivotal role. Chapter three then moves into the analysis of women's bodies in the first two decades of the twentieth century. George focuses on the meaning and shifting treatment of pregnancy and pregnant women, heavily using the works of such artists as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Much of the analysis rests on such women authors as Else Feldmann and Carry Hauser. George's use of different materials and genres is especially evident in this chapter. We find the theme interrogated through poetry, film, journalism, literature, art, and architecture. The last section of this chapter takes up a theme that remains important through rest of the book: the bodies of working-class men and especially women. In chapter 4 we follow the bodies in motion, particularly in dance, pantomime, and film. I expected to read about sports, athletics, boxing, and soccer—all which made a major impact on the practices of the body at the turn of the century—but George argues that an important motivation for the body was rather the interest in language and especially in nonverbal language presented in pantomime and dance. In the center are important pioneers of modern dance, Ruth St. Denis and Grete Wiesenthal. The chapter ends with an interesting analysis of the efforts to reform the worker's body with dance in the 1920s and 1930s.

These four chapters amount to an incredibly rich analysis of the bodies in their literary, cinematographic, scientific, and artistic representations embedded in a thick description of the class and gendered environment. In this regard, Alys George has set a high standard for any work in body studies and also the history of the body. There is virtually no trace of discourse analysis, but all pieces of evidence have been carefully tracked down to individual agents or institutions. The extensive footnotes are a testimony to this careful work. It is in this approach that lies the strength of the book. At the same time, by digging through the layers of cultural meanings and manifestations down to the individuals, such as Klimt or Pappenheim or Wiesenthal, who produced and reproduced the Viennese practices of the body, George leaves us with the question of how and whether the body changed in this era. The overarching answer has come from the modernization theory. While Schorske saw overall modernization and modernism as the driving forces in changing the lives of Viennese populace, George suggests that there was a set, a matrix of forces pushing the body to become “a medium for sociopolitical reform” (170). The question is then whether we should or could operate with the concept of modernization at all. This dilemma might become even more relevant when we move into the realm of the body that George excluded—and justifiably so—from her study. Would the various forms of sport or nude culture or walking fit into this image of a matrix of modernization that George has so wonderfully depicted? This is the question the field of body studies must face.