ABSTRACT
Following hints from Bakhtin (1981), Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary presented the rise of the modern novel as a progress across certain ‘chronotopes’, or concrete times and places central for the rise of modernity which at the same time were birthplaces of the modern novel, through the intermediary of the theatre, as – here following hints from Agnew (1986) – the theatre was considered as not simply ‘reflecting’ such changes, rather a crucial operator in them as a social practice. The rise of the hypermodern novel is also connected to a new chronotope, and a particularly intriguing one, given that Austria never before or after played a major role in modern or European culture, except for the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn at the end of the eighteenth century,1 while in the few decades before World War I it suddenly catapulted itself into the incubator of modernism.
