The book on Upper Austria is the third volume of a comprehensive series that presents all provinces of Austria
during the period under consideration, the country was subdivided into seven German Reich Districts in the form
of a blanket coverage survey of the manual type. By analogy to the previously published volumes on Styria and
Carinthia, it is the first time-limited literature dictionary of a province, understood as a regional literary subsystem
described in terms of the interaction of authors and literary institutions. Accordingly, its institutions (organization
chart of culture, promotion and censorship, literary associations, theatre, radio, publishing houses, periodicals and
anthologies) and its authors are shown as interlinked players in the style of a manual. As National Socialism was a
dictatorship and as the centres of power were outside the region, this account goes beyond the bounds of their
relative autonomy by describing interactions, interventions by and dependencies from the centres. Therefore, the
book can be regarded as an attempt to create an empirical and analytical basis for the portrayal of the field of
literature in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu.
Methodologically, the aim is to provide a complete overview in that the process does not resort to a restricting,
judgemental reliance on canonisations, thus avoiding the risk of a preferential treatment of certain subfactors (e.g.
of the "most important" institutions and personalities, of the selective perception of groups of texts such as the so-
called high literature and light fiction, children`s and youth literature, popular science publications, of propaganda
literature, esoteric, occult and religious works, of so-called folk literature etc.). Due to the density of the
information based on the wide range of source materials (materials from the archives and printed matter) it is
possible to substitute formal criteria for qualitative criteria.
In order to lay bare continuities and fracture lines, special consideration is given to the dynamism of historical
caesuras in case of biographies, for instance, both what went before and what happened after are partially
included. Of significance are the inclusion of the denazification files and the prohibition lists after 1945 as well as
the literature awards and distinctions, which illustrate the integration of a writer in the various systems, from the
Monarchy to the post-World War Two republic, in Germany and Austria.