Local Communities and New Elites in Austria-Hungary

This book comprises chapters that have emerged from the Research Group on Slavic Cultures in the Habsburg Monarchy. They focus on individuals and the environments they inhabited and co-created: their communities. Adopting a direct approach to a segment of late nineteenth-century social reality in Central Europe, the book explores the multifaceted relationship between people and the places they lived in, as well as the conditions underpinning the formation of various communities and the signs of their genuine – rather than ideologically prescribed – existence. The chapters examine the factors responsible for the reconfiguration of social realities that sustained particular cultural communities, regardless of their size or influence, all of which required self-identification and self-constitution.

This book comprises chapters that have emerged from the Research Group on Slavic Cultures in the Habsburg Monarchy. They focus on individuals and the environments they inhabited and co-created: their communities. Adopting a direct approach to a segment of late nineteenth-century social reality in Central Europe, the book explores the multifaceted relationship between people and the places they lived in, as well as the conditions underpinning the formation of various communities and the signs of their genuine – rather than ideologically prescribed – existence. The chapters examine the factors responsible for the reconfiguration of social realities that sustained particular cultural communities, regardless of their size or influence, all of which required self-identification and self-constitution.