Liberal Reason and the Culture of the Sommerfrische

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Deborah R. Coen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
General Public ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

Fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to supply historians and the general public alike with a paradigm of the modernist subversion of rationality. From the birth of the unconscious, to the artistic expression of feral sexuality, to the surge of populist politics, Vienna 1900 stands as the turning point when a nineteenth-century ideal of rationality gave way to a twentieth-century fascination with subjectivity. In fact, we know little as yet about what rationality really meant to those to whom we attribute its undoing. Allan Janik writes that today the “‘big’ questions about Viennese culture” center on “just how ‘rational’ developments there have been,” and to answer these questions, Janik argues, we need research on the history of natural science in Austria. Indeed, as Steven Beller notes, the topic of science has been “strangely absent” from the animated discussions of fin-de-siècle Vienna over the past three decades.

scholarly journals Dissociation and the Unconscious Mind: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Mediumship

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-596
Author(s):  
Carlos S. Alvarado
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
History Of ◽  
Memory States ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Unconscious Mind

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

Heaven Has Eyes

2020 ◽  
pp. 303-308
Author(s):  
Xiaoqun Xu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Agents ◽  
Western Influences ◽  
Law And Justice

The conclusion points out the multidimensional interactions of many factors in the functions of Chinese law and justice in the past and present and delineates four overlapping historical contexts for an understanding of such functions. These are the indigenous traditions in the long history of China; Western influences from the nineteenth century and especially on the transformations in the twentieth century; interactions between lawmakers and state agents, and between state actions and societal responses; and the reality of justice being done in relative and imperfect ways under the best circumstances, due to human fallibility.

scholarly journals Fifteenth Century Saints, Nineteenth Century Neurologists, and Twentieth Century Immunotherapy: The Eccentric History of Multiple Sclerosis

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Paul J Maglione
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Sclerosis ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Multiple sclerosis has a long, fascinating, serendipi- tous, and well-documented history. The first recorded mention of the disease can be dated back to the fifteenth century, while a truly exhaustive investigation of the disorder began with the nineteenth century’s burgeoning neurologists. These records reveal a fascinating story of meticulous science aimed at comprehending a truly perplexing illness, one that even today is not completely understood. The great nineteenth century French neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot became very interested in studying this disease, and through his celebrity garnered much attention to a previously unknown affliction. Here we review a story of pioneering research that grants brief tribute to some of the more remarkable experiments, wondering if ideas born in the past may help develop solutions in the future. 

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.

Index and Time

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Lost Time

In the first decades of the twentieth century, understandings of how photographs served the study of history again changed. These changes emerged from practices at Paris’s municipal historical institutions and within publishing houses. Attention to the pages of illustrated histories, or photohistories, reveals both the increased presence of photographs, often used as indexes of historical places, and a new mode of interpreting older photographs as a haunting slice of lost time and a way of accessing emotional links to the past. Photographs became particularly haunting in the years after World War I, when nostalgia for the much-photographed prewar fin-de-siècle, or Paris 1900, made Parisians seem stranded in the present.

: British Public Administration

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Rigour ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Phoenix

This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled ‘dodo’, ‘phoenix’, and ‘chameleon’. The ‘dodo’ interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British Public Administration as in serious decline from early promise and former greatness. The ‘phoenix’ interpretation is a more optimistic perception of the subject as advancing in scientific rigour and conceptual sophistication over the century, leaving behind the outmoded styles of the past. A third view, the ‘chameleon’ interpretation, is a picture of lateral transformation, with the adoption of new intellectual colouring and markings to fit a new era.

The Debate over El Lobo: Can Historians Make a Difference?

2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Marsha Weisiger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Endangered Species ◽  
General Public ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
Gray Wolf ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

In February 2003, historians, wolf-experts, ranchers, environmental activists, and some two hundred members of the general public gathered in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to discuss the past, present, and future of the Mexican gray wolf. “Leopold Forum: El Lobo” explored the history of wolf extirpation in the early twentieth century and the recent contested effort to reintroduce wolves into the Southwest, under the Endangered Species Act. The program included keynote addresses by a historian, a wolf biologist, and a ranching spokesperson; a series of panel presentations; a dinner featuring an environmental activist as speaker; and a roundtable discussion. A private breakfast-discussion among the stakeholders, facilitated by a professional conflict negotiator, followed the conference. The article narrates the history of wolf extirpation and reintroduction, and describes the logistics of organizing the conference and its outcome.

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Drug Induced ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
Plot Structure

Prompted by Victorians’ frequent conflation of body and text, the introduction argues that Victorian fiction’s narrative form, specifically plot structure and focalization, contributed to the development of disability as a concept; in particular, as fiction’s form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen. The chapter addresses focalization’s evocation of the perceiving body, linking focalization to theories of staring and the specular in disability studies, and it provides a history of scholarship on Victorian illness and disability, thus placing the book’s argument in the fields of narratology, disability studies, and Victorian studies.

GENDER IN MODERN EUROPE: CRIME AND VIRTUE Gender and crime in modern Europe. Edited by Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne. London: UCL Press, 1999. Pp. xv+288. ISBN 1-85728-746-0. £14.99. Breaking the codes: female criminality in fin-de-siècle Paris. By Ann-Louise Shapiro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. vi+265. ISBN 0-8047-2693-0. £10.95. Reign of virtue: mobilizing gender in Vichy France. By Miranda Pollard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xxi+285. ISBN 0-226-67350-2. £15.95.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-965
Author(s):  
KRISTEN STROMBERG CHILDERS
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Gender And Crime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Louis Xvi

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion in scholarship about issues of gender in the history of modern Europe. Historians have taken up topics from the fall of Louis XVI during the Revolution to the role of women in fascism to demonstrate the pivotal importance that matters of sexual difference have made in shaping politics, culture, and society in the last centuries. Scholars have realized that interpretations of class dynamics, work relations, collective action, and nations at war, for example, look considerably different and are far more complex when attention is paid to gender. Where the study of women in the past was once relegated to the backwaters, now courses on women's history and gender have taken a permanent place in most university curricula. Histories that include women have moved from ‘her-story’ (crudely, the history of individual women and their accomplishments) to analyses that use gender as an interpretative prism through which to view larger social and political transformations.The three books under review participate in this larger movement toward integrating the perspectives of gender into major issues of European history that have been researched by historians before, but from a standpoint that these authors find lacking. Margaret Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, as editors of a collection of essays on gender and crime, wish to correct some of the assumptions about women and crime that have been ignored by historians who focus mostly on more historically conspicuous male criminals. Ann-Louise Shapiro uses the trials of criminal women in late nineteenth-century Paris as ‘lightning rods’ that illuminate the social, political, and cultural conflicts of the fin-de-siècle.

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