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fin-de-siècle literature: Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle Talia Schaffer, 2007 This unprecedented comprehensive anthology of short canonical readings on important topics in fin-de-siècle literature offers the most prominent examples of poetry, fiction, prose, and drama for thorough in-depth study. This anticipated collection features non-canonical stories, poems, and articles alongside well-known works by fin-de-siècle authors. By bringing to the forefront the definition and the significance of the fin-de-siècle movement, this anthology involves the reader in a continual scholarly endeavor. Organized into two thematic units, Aestheticism and The New Women, this text includes a range of authors: from Wilde and Kipling to Housman and Pater. Annotations and unit introductions supply brief, informative explanations to aid comprehension. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Victims of the Book Francois Proulx, 2019-11-04 Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle Gail Marshall, 2007-08-02 Publisher description |
fin-de-siècle literature: Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions Lyn Pykett, 2014-07-21 The fin de siècle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siècle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle Stephen Arata, 1996-08-29 It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siècle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siècle. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Fin de Siècle Sally Ledger, Roger Luckhurst, 2000 The fin-de-si cle period--roughly the years 1880 to 1900--was characterized by great cultural and political ambivalence, an anxiety for things lost, and a longing for the new. It also included an outpouring of intellectual responses to the conflicting times from such eminent writers as T. H. Huxley, Emma Goldman, William James, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. In this important anthology, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students, scholars, and general readers a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-si cle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology, Anthropology, and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes that carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle Linda C. Dowling, 2014-07-14 As Dr. Dowling demonstrates, literary Decadence in this linguistic and cultural context was to reveal itself as a mode of Romanticism demoralized by philology. Decadent writers like Paler and Wilde and Beardslcy sought to preserve a few precious fragments from what they imagined--and paradoxically welcomed--as England's imminent decline and fall. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Shape of Fear Susan Jennifer Navarette, 2014-07-11 During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Walter Pater and others changed the nature of thought concerning the human body and the physical environment that had shaped it. In response, the 1890s saw the publication of a series of remarkable literary works that had their genesis in the intense scientific and aesthetic activity of those preceding decades—texts that emphasized themes of degeneration and were themselves stylistically decompositive, with language both a surrogate for physical deformity and a source of anxiety. Susan J. Navarette examines the ways in which scientific and cultural concerns of late nineteenth-century England are coded in the horror literature of the period. By contextualizing the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to reenact textually the entropic forces they perceived in the natural world, Navarette reconstructs the late Victorian mentalité. She analyzes aesthetic responses to trends in contemporary science and explores horror writers' use of scientific methodologies to support their perception that a long-awaited period of cultural decline had begun. In her analysis of the classics Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, Navarette shows how James and Conrad made artistic use of earlier scientific readings of the body. She also considers works by lesser-known authors Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, and Arthur Machen, who produced fin de siècle stories that took the form of hybrid literary monstrosities. To underscore the fascination with bodily decay and deformation that these writers explored, The Shape of Fear is enhanced with prints and line drawings by Victor Hugo, James Ensor, and other artists of the day. This elegantly written book formulates a new canon of late Victorian fiction that will intrigue scholars of literature and cultural history. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly, 2000-02-10 In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle Zdeněk Beran, Irena Grubica, 2016-09-23 This volume explores various facets of the relationship between the fantastic and the fin de siècle. The essays included here examine how the fin de siècle reflects the fantastic and its relation to the genesis of aesthetic ideas, to the concepts of terror and horror, the sublime, and evil, to Gothic and sensation fiction, to the Aesthetic Movement and Decadence. They also raise the question regarding the ways in which fantastic literature reflects the dynamic and all-too-often controversial development of the concept of the fantastic. At the same time, the majority of the contributions also investigate a broader context of specific social, political and economic conditions that frame the fantastic of the fin de siècle. They examine how fantastic genres use narrative manipulations, and how they incorporate various ideas of scientific development and progress by highlighting the role of religion, cultural anxiety and social crisis, as well as exploring the ways such genres use the fantastic for various purposes of cultural and social subversion. Fin de siècle fantastic literature is also investigated across a variety of cultures, as reflected in Scottish, Canadian, Australian, American and British writing, with particular emphasis on their predominant cultural or generic aspects, the genesis of the fin de siècle fantastic in some of these cultures and literatures, and their relations to a wider historical and cultural framework. The essays as a whole represent the work of scholars working in a diverse range of fields, and therefore adopt a wide range of approaches to the fantastic. As such, this volume provides a fresh and stimulating platform for further rethinking of the concept of the fantastic and its relation to fin de siècle literature, and its theoretical, philosophical, generic, and other implications within a broader literary, social and cultural context. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Fin-de-Siècle World Michael Saler, 2014-11-20 This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life, and is truly innovative in examining the Fin de Siècle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe. Thematic topics covered include new concepts of time and space, globalization, the city, and new political movements including nationalism, the New Liberalism, and socialism and communism. The volume also looks at the development of mass media over this period and emerging trends in culture, such as advertising and consumption, film and publishing, as well as the technological and scientific changes that shaped the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the invention of the telephone, new transport systems, eugenics and physics. The Fin-de-Siècle World also considers issues such as selfhood through chapters looking at gender, sexuality, adolescence, race and class, and considers the importance of different religions, both old and new, at the turn of the century. Finally the volume examines significant and emerging trends in art, music and literature alongside movements such as realism and aestheticism. This volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular and artistic culture, social practices and scientific endeavours fitted together in an exciting world of change. It will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Fin-de-Siècle period. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Lesbian Decadence Nicole G. Albert, 2016-02-23 In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled The Lesbians and described women as femmes damnées, with disordered souls suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the Belle Époque. Lesbian Decadence, now available in English for the first time, provides a new analysis and synthesis of the depiction of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and a symptom of social malaise as well as a fantasy in that most vibrant place and period in history. In this newly translated work, praised by leading critics as authoritative, stunning, and a marvel of elegance and erudition, Nicole G. Albert analyzes and synthesizes an engagingly rich sweep of historical representations of the lesbian mystique in art and literature. Albert contrasts these visions to moralists' abrupt condemnations of the lesbian vice, as well as the newly emerging psychiatric establishment's medical fury and their obsession on cataloging and classifying symptoms of inversion or perversion in order to cure these unbalanced creatures of love. Lesbian Decadence combines literary, artistic, and historical analysis of sources from the mainstream to the rare, from scholarly studies to popular culture. The English translation provides a core reference/text for those interested in the Decadent movement, in literary history, in French history and social history. It is well suited for courses in gender studies, women's studies, LGBT history, and lesbianism in literature, history, and art. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fin de Siècle and Its Legacy Mikulas Teich, Roy Porter, 1990-12-13 For many years the term fin de siècle has been used to imply a state of decadence which was thought to have pervaded 'civilised' European society in the years around 1900. This volume of essays, which draw on a very wide range of disciplines, argues that the period was in fact one of dramatic change, essentially positive and forward-looking in character. This was the period of the rise of the giant corporation, of mass production and mass consumption, and of the development of the generation and distribution of electrical energy. Novel social features such as mass politics, mass media, and mass sport involved the body of ordinary people and in the arts, complex reactions to contemporary social reality were aroused and expressed. This was also the period which gave birth to the study of quantum mechanics, relativity physics, mental processes and genetics. This volume forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which began with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981) and has continued with Romanticism in National Context (1988). They bring together comparative, national and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and actions. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle Sally Ledger, Scott McCracken, 1995-02-02 Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle scrutinises ways in which current conflicts of 'race', class, and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de siècle, whose influence stretched from the 1890s, when economic depression signalled the end of Britain's role as 'the workshop of the world', to 1914 when world war accelerated imperial decline. This collaborative venture by new and established scholars includes discussion of the 'New Woman', the reconstruction of masculinities, and of feminism and empire. The imperialist theme is pursued in essays on Yeats and Ireland, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the figure of the vampire. The rise of socialism and psychoanalysis, and the relationship between nascent modernism and late twentieth-century postmodernism are also addressed in this radical account. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle Christine Ferguson, 2017-03-02 Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle Stefano Evangelista, 2021 The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers' attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism--or world citizenship--informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Fin-de-siècle Poem Joseph Bristow, 2005 Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siecle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that shows why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siecle poetry, the collection explains how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter in turn provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief. The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of such legendary writers as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W.B. Yeats, whose careers have always been associated with the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson. The Fin-de-Siecle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations made in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how woman poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.Joseph Bristow is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edits the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature. His recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, and the variorum edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Decadent Subjects Charles Bernheimer, 2002-07 Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds. In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term. Decadent Subjects is a coherent and moving picture of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and thoughtful, this remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to show why people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence, all the more important as we emerge from our own fin de siècle. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Petersburg Fin de Siècle Mark D. Steinberg, 2011-11-29 The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described and interpreted the troubled years between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.Mark Steinberg, distinguished historian of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examines the work of writers of all kinds, from anonymous journalists to well-known public intellectuals, from secular liberals to religious conservatives. Though diverse in their perspectives, these urban writers were remarkably consistent in the worries they expressed. They grappled with the impact of technological and material progress on the one hand, and with an ever-deepening anxiety and pessimism on the other. Steinberg reveals a new, darker perspective on the history of St. Petersburg on the eve of revolution and presents a fresh view of Russia's experience of modernity. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle S. Karschay, 2015-01-01 This exciting new study looks at degeneration and deviance in nineteenth-century science and late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The questions it raises are as relevant today as they were at the nineteenth century's fin de siecle: What constitutes the norm from which a deviation has occurred? What exactly does it mean to be 'normal' or 'abnormal'? |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fin-de-Siècle Splendor Dewei Wang, 1997 The reigning view of literary historians has been that the May Fourth movement of 1919 marks the division between the traditional and the modern in Chinese literature. This book argues that signs of reform and innovation can be discerned long before May Fourth, and that as China entered the arena of modern, international history in the late Qing, it was already developing its own complex matrix of incipient modernities. It demonstrates that late Qing fiction nurtured a creative, innovative poetics, one that was spurned by the reformers of the May Fourth generation in favor of Western-style realism. The author recognizes that a full account of modern Chinese fiction needs to ask why so many genres, styles, themes, and figures found in late imperial fiction were repressed by modern Chinese literary discourse. He focuses on four genres of late Qing fiction that have been either rudely dismissed in pejorative terms or simply ignored: depravity romances, court-case and chivalric cycles, grotesque exposés, and scientific fantasies. The author shows that in spite of the realist orthodoxy that has dominated Chinese literature since the May Fourth movement, these unwelcome genres have continually found their way back into mainstream discourse, their influence being increasingly evident in recent decades. This first comprehensive study of late Qing fiction discusses more than sixty works, at least half of which have rarely or never been dealt with by Western or Chinese scholars. Richly informed by contemporary literary theory, this book constitutes a polemical rethinking of the nature of Chinese literary and cultural modernity. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Spectacular Realities Vanessa R. Schwartz, 1998 An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption.—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fin de Sicle/Fin du Globe John Stokes, 1992-11-20 The internationally distinguished scholars who have contributed to this timely book were asked to take part in a collaborative act of demystification: a reconsideration of the eschatological ideas of the last fin de sicle, the 1890s, in the light of the critical thought of the 1990s. Their essays draw upon a range of approaches, and are broadly interdisciplinary. All are characterised by the realisation that, with a century's hindsight, the late 1800s should be seen not so much as a period of decadence as of discovery and growth. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Exotic Memories , 1991-05 This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto 'savage' or 'primitive' cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism. In concentrating on writers from the age of the New Imperialism (1880-1920), this book reveals an important contradiction at the heart of the exoticist impulse: the very expansion that enabled European writers to go in search of exotic Others ensured the eventual disappearance of the exotic. Turn-of-the-century writers of exoticism thus give voice to a deep nostalgia both for the values supposedly lost to the West in its process of modernization and for those once exotic places in which they found, with increasing disappointment, not pristine innocence but merely the traces of their own culture. The author concentrates on four writers - Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad - although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. The works of these four writers foreground attitudes and assumptions useful for understanding a wide array of phenomena: an examination of these works shows how nostalgia for a cultural Other was built into the intellectual configuration of modernism, throws light on the early history of anthropology, and helps us understand features of our own cultural formation that are becoming increasingly important in today's global village. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the 'weak thought' of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose poststructuralist theories are only now becoming known in the United States. 'Weak thought' seeks to supersede outmoded, metaphysical categories of thought, not by replacing them with something new, but by an elegaic, recollective, and rhetorical dwelling within those categories. The author also makes creative use of narrative theory, and draws on the recent 'new historicism', reading literary texts to excellent effect against the historical events that made them possible. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Decadent Reader Asti Hustvedt, 1998-11 A collection of stories and novels from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, decay, and deviance.In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-si cle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mend s, Rachilde, Jean Mor as, Octave Mirbeau, Jos phin P ladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-si cle France. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles L. Dryden, 2003-09-01 The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic to the late 19th century metropolis, this volume explores the cultural history of London in the 19th century. The subsequent discussion of the Gothic fictions of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells offers new perspectives from which to assess the impact of contemporary perceptions of London as a Gothicized space on the works of these novelists. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle Jennifer Sattaur, 2011-01-18 This book reads Victorian fin de siècle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between ‘monstrous’ and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children’s and Adults’ texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which the emergent social movements which have come to define and represent change in the fin-de-siècle period were inherently concerned with the ideas of childhood and parenthood and the ways in which they represented both the promise and the threat of the future. The texts are arranged by theme, and grouped according to whether they are seen primarily as intended for children, or for adults. In texts intended for adult readers, images of childhood are more covert and more metaphorical than those texts aimed at child readers, in which overt pedagogical concerns are often brought to bear. Nothing embodies the idea of the future more than the children who stand as a bridge between ‘now’ and ‘then.’ This book analyses the connections between Victorian perceptions of childhood and the anxieties and upheavals of the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Ancients Against Moderns Joan DeJean, 1997-03-15 As the end of the 20th century approaches, many predict that it will mirror the 19th-century decline into decadence. The author of this text finds a closer analogy with the culture wars of France in the 1690s - the time of a battle of the books known as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fictions of British Decadence Kirsten MacLeod, 2006-04-21 Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Children's Literature and the Fin de Siècle Roderick McGillis, 2003-11-30 The close of a century invites both retrospection and prognostication. As a period of transition, it also brings a sense of uncertainty, finality, and apocalypticism. These feelings stem from various events, such as political turmoil, scientific advancements, and social change. As might be expected, literature reflects such changes and the feelings they engender. But perhaps more surprisingly, children's literature is especially sensitive to such matters, and fiction for children often struggles with dark and unpleasant issues. This book examines fin de siècle tensions in 19th- and 20th-century children's literature from around the world. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor, and the volume ranges over a disparate variety of topics. These include poetry, series books, pacifist fiction, gender issues, religion and literature, eco-criticism, minority experiences, humor and the Holocaust, fantasy and science fiction, and computer culture. In exploring these issues in relation to children's literature, the contributors reveal the shifting nature of our values and the world in which we live. Global in nature, the chapters look at children's literature from such places as Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle Emily Alder, 2020-01-07 This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Anxiety, Angst, Anguish in Fin de Siècle Art and Literature Luba Jurgenson, Rosina Neginsky, Marthe Segrestin, 2020-02-06 This volume examines various manifestations of anguish in art, literature, and philosophy. It demonstrates that the experience of anguish manifested itself in a spectacular way in the arts in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. It makes obvious the extraordinary tension between anguish and art. The works discussed here reflect the magnitude of anguish generated by historical events, scientific advancements (especially in psychology), and metaphysical inquiries of the time. Through the invention of new artistic languages, those works also illustrate the fecundity of anguish for artists. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Fleeting Cities A. Geppert, 2010-11-03 Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world wide web. Conceptualizing expositions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities constitutes a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed in the European metropolis around 1900. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Daughters of Decadence Elaine Showalter, 1993 This collection brings together 20 short stories of the fin-de-siecle and includes such writers as George Egerton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson and Olive Schreiner. The stories range from the lyrical to the Gothic and frequently deal with the conflicts of women writers. At the turn of the century, short stories by- and often about- 'New Women' flooded the pages of English and American magazines like The Yellow Book, The Savoy, Atlantic Monthly and Harpers. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form, and courageous in its candid literary aspiration, shocked Victorian critics who parodied the experimental stories in Punch as symptoms of fin de siecle decadence, or denounced the authors as 'literary degenerates' or 'erotomaniacs.' This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories, including such little-known writers as Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Vernon Lee, Constance Fenimore Wollson and Charlotte Mew. Ranging from the lyrical to the Gothic, and frequently dealing with the conflicts of women artists, the short fiction of the fin de siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorianism women writers and the new era of feminist modernism. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Disruptive Acts Mary Louise Roberts, 2017-03-15 In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the new women, a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly masculine work outside the home. Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny. Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle Beth Rodgers, 2016-10-06 This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These ‘daughters of today’, ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern girls’, as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children’s books and girls’ magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Decadence, Degeneration, and the End Marja Härmänmaa, Christopher Nissen, 2014-11-19 Art and literature during the European fin-de-siècle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley. |
fin-de-siècle literature: Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle Amanda Anderson, Joseph Valente, 2002-01-15 Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and policing. Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle questions these assumptions by examining, for the first time, in so sustained a manner, the rise of a select number of academic disciplines in a historical perspective. This collection of twelve essays focuses on the late Victorian era in Great Britain but also on Germany, France, and America in the same formative period. The contributors--James Buzard, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Liah Greenfeld, John Guillory, Simon Joyce, Henrika Kuklick, Christopher Lane, Jeff Nunokawa, Arkady Plotnitsky, Ivan Strenski, Athena Vrettos, and Gauri Viswanathan--examine the genealogy of various fields including English, sociology, economics, psychology, and quantum physics. Together with the editors' cogent introduction, they challenge the story of disciplinary formation as solely one of consolidation, constraint, and ideological justification. Addressing a broad range of issues--disciplinary formations, disciplinarity and professionalism, disciplines of the self, discipline and the state, and current disciplinary debates--the book aims to dislodge what the editors call the comfortable pessimism that too readily assimilates disciplines to techniques of management or control. It advances considerably the effort to more fully comprehend the complex legacy of the human sciences. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Poetics of Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Italy Stefano Evangelista, Valeria Giannantonio, Elisabetta Selmi, 2018 This volume explores the themes of degeneration and regeneration in fin-de-siècle Italian culture. Some contributions reflect on the poetics of decadence, while others focus on significant figures of the period and their literary, critical and artistic work, providing analysis from both national and comparative perspectives. |
fin-de-siècle literature: The Jewish Decadence Jonathan Freedman, 2021-04-26 Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century-- |
为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? - 知乎
Jan 16, 2018 · 为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? 本来动画片结尾加个英文单词End就觉得很有逼格了,不过是以前。 但最近发现,不少用Fin的 Fin:一些罗曼语的End,比如法语 …
Fish with missing fin | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
FISH WITH MISSING FIN Fishing Wisconsin The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) fisheries biologists track fish for research purposes. There are various ways DNR marks fish, …
为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? - 知乎
Jan 16, 2018 · 为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? 本来动画片结尾加个英文单词End就觉得很有逼格了,不过是以前。 但最近发现,不少用Fin的 Fin:一些罗曼语的End,比如法语 …
Snakehead, Bowfin, or Burbot Know the difference
The snakehead’s anal fin is long - about 2/3 the length of the dorsal fin, while the bowfin’s anal fin is short - less than one quarter the length of the dorsal fin, and The snakehead’s pelvic fins are …
Did I catch a snakehead? | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
The bowfin, a Wisconsin native. Snakeheads may be confused with our native bowfin (dogfish) or burbot. Snakehead and bowfin body and fin shapes are very similar. However, there are two …
Tagged fish | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
Another type is a metal tag found on the dorsal fin of the fish. Each tag has a unique serial number stamped on it that identifies that fish. It may also have an address to send the tag to. …
Permits | Wisconsin DNR
Purchase your fishing and hunting licenses, permits and stamps; order ATV/UTV and snowmobile trail passes; and more.
Lake sturgeon | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
A giant among Wisconsin's inland freshwater fishes, the bottom-dwelling lake sturgeon is a living fossil - a relic from the Middle Ages of fish evolution. This ancient species made its first …
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Dedicated to working with the citizens and businesses of the state while preserving and enhancing the natural resources of Wisconsin.
Bluegill | Fishes of Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
Scientific name: Lepomis macrochirus (Lepomis means "scaled cheek"; macrochirus means "large hand", possibly in reference to the size of the pectoral fin). Distribution: Bluegill occurs …
为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? - 知乎
Jan 16, 2018 · 为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? 本来动画片结尾加个英文单词End就觉得很有逼格了,不过是以前。 但最近发现,不少用Fin的 Fin:一些罗曼语的End,比如法语 …
Fish with missing fin | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
FISH WITH MISSING FIN Fishing Wisconsin The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) fisheries biologists track fish for research purposes. There are various ways DNR marks fish, …
为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? - 知乎
Jan 16, 2018 · 为什么现在不少动画都用Fin结尾而不用End? 本来动画片结尾加个英文单词End就觉得很有逼格了,不过是以前。 但最近发现,不少用Fin的 Fin:一些罗曼语的End,比如法语 …
Snakehead, Bowfin, or Burbot Know the difference
The snakehead’s anal fin is long - about 2/3 the length of the dorsal fin, while the bowfin’s anal fin is short - less than one quarter the length of the dorsal fin, and The snakehead’s pelvic fins are …
Did I catch a snakehead? | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
The bowfin, a Wisconsin native. Snakeheads may be confused with our native bowfin (dogfish) or burbot. Snakehead and bowfin body and fin shapes are very similar. However, there are two …
Tagged fish | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
Another type is a metal tag found on the dorsal fin of the fish. Each tag has a unique serial number stamped on it that identifies that fish. It may also have an address to send the tag to. …
Permits | Wisconsin DNR
Purchase your fishing and hunting licenses, permits and stamps; order ATV/UTV and snowmobile trail passes; and more.
Lake sturgeon | Fishing Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
A giant among Wisconsin's inland freshwater fishes, the bottom-dwelling lake sturgeon is a living fossil - a relic from the Middle Ages of fish evolution. This ancient species made its first …
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources
Dedicated to working with the citizens and businesses of the state while preserving and enhancing the natural resources of Wisconsin.
Bluegill | Fishes of Wisconsin | Wisconsin DNR
Scientific name: Lepomis macrochirus (Lepomis means "scaled cheek"; macrochirus means "large hand", possibly in reference to the size of the pectoral fin). Distribution: Bluegill occurs …