In 2003, Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp secured a four-year grant from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Their prolific production demonstrates what scholarly commitment enabled by adequate funding in the humanities can accomplish. Along with their collaborators, most predominantly Sabine Wieber, these researchers organized two conferences, staged two exhibitions, and produced an exhibition catalogue, as well as this collection of essays. Journeys into Madness works with metaphorics incited by the spatial turn and literalizes these through the very history of travel that must be involved in historicizing the problem of madness and mental illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire circa 1900. The editors write that the essays “are all concerned with the permeability of … boundaries,” but the boundaries they lay out are not only a matter of geography or pathology; they are also historiographic (3).

Steven Beller's essay reiterates his repositioning of Freud's Jewishness in relationship to his work and, importantly, as over and against what he calls the dominant reading of Carl Schorske's by now canonical claims. Indeed, overall this volume “participates … in the larger re-articulation of the Schorskean paradigm” at the same time that it explicitly distances itself from two key aspects of Schorske's well-known classic text (5). Principally, the authors shift attention from the singularity of Freud in Vienna 1900, and they depart from the centrality of failed liberalism and related retreat into the private sphere in Schorske's study. Each of the essays participates in these tasks to varying degrees, but all seek to work out and away from the dominant understanding of the period and its cultural artifacts, broadly conceived. Each essay delivers new insights; what goes missing, though, with the exception of Beller's essay, is an explicit and intentional engagement with the significance of Jewishness in many of the most central figures in this volume.

Leslie Topp's essay, “The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna,” lays out beautifully some of the details involved in the exhibitions, thereby illuminating the central concerns and even some of the difficulties that the curators encountered along the way. Other essays take on canonical texts and decouple them from what the author casts as too common misconceptions. Geoffrey C. Howes accomplishes this in his contribution to the volume in his rereading of Robert Musil's madhouse chapter that, as he convincingly shows, must be separated from Vienna's Steinhof and placed in Rome where it belongs. Gemma Blackshaw's piece on Peter Altenberg illustrates how his biography and his work are precisely emblematic of the interdependencies of cultural production and madness for which the volume overall argues. Notably, Gavin Plumley mobilizes the meeting between Mahler and Freud in 1910 as the point of departure for his essay as he convincingly explores the significance of psychoanalysis for Mahler in his well-documented moment of crisis in 1910 and the status of the auditory for the development of Freud's notion of the unconscious. Nicole Imrie, Jill Steward, and Anna Lehniger all make solid contributions regarding the institutional settings for madness at the turn of the century and the role these played in a complex landscape that boasted myriad new public and private psychiatric facilities by the first decade of the twentieth century. Thomas Müller and Frank Kuhn journey outside Austria-Hungary for this purpose in the final essay in the volume, “The Württemberg Asylum of Schussenried: A Psychiatric Space and Its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the Outside.”

Gender analysis appears in several of the essays, but some are stronger than others in this regard. Sabine Wieber's essay does a brilliant job of bringing together every strand the editors identify as critical to their enterprise, and she does so in an elegant interweaving of cultural history and theoretical insight. Her essay, “Vienna's Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero,” examines Empress Elizabeth's literal and figurative journeys, with attention to the visual record and its implications, while raising questions about gender in a way that will be productive and accessible to a wide range of students.

Beyond meeting its own expectations as delineated by its editors, this volume demonstrates extremely well the range of questions that remain to be explored regarding the cultural history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This achievement is an additional reason for its inclusion in advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars. Journeys into Madness could be used especially productively in a class in coordination with other contributions from the collaboration that produced this work and the related exhibitions.