What was the function of the invocation of destiny in the increasingly secularized era of turn-of-the-century Vienna? By exploring this question, Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler's Prose offers a new psycho-sociological perspective on the narrative works of Arthur Schnitzler. While the relationship between the terms "stereotype" and "destiny" is by no means immediately obvious, Kolkenbrock shows how in Schnitzler's narratives these notions serve as an interrelated coping mechanism for a central psychological conflict of modernity: namely, the paradoxical need to be recognized as both "normal" and "special" at the same time. While, through the complex of "stereotype and destiny," Schnitzler's narrative works address central modern questions of identity and subjecthood, Kolkenbrock's close readings also reveal how the texts inscribe themselves aesthetically in the literary tradition of Romanticism and as such offer crucial sources for understanding Schnitzler's representations of embattled subjecthood within broader social and aesthetic traditions.