“A BEAUTIFUL TRANSLATION FROM A VERY IMPERFECT ORIGINAL”: MABEL WOTTON, AESTHETICISM, AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY BORROWING

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Anderson Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Own Name

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

First Life—and then Fame

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Reznicek
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s 1910 novel, Max, explores the bohemian Paris of the fin-de-siècle through the eyes of a young artist newly arrived from Russia. This young man is, however, actually a young princess in disguise, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Through the use of disguise and the New Woman figure of the female-to-male transvestite, this novel represents Paris through two competing genres: the masculine adventure narrative and the female romance.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Symons, Arthur William (1865–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Boyiopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
French Symbolism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Story Writer

Arthur Symons was a British poet, art and literary critic, memoirist, playwright, short story writer, and editor. He was born in Milford Haven, Wales, on 28 February 1865, the son of Cornish parents: Reverend Mark Symons (1824–1898), a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Lydia Pascoe (1828–1896). Symons was the foremost exponent of Decadence and the leading promoter of French Symbolism in Britain. An enthused socialite, he manoeuvred successfully through London artistic circles and the Paris avant-garde. In 1901 he married Rhoda Bowser (1874–-1936) and in his later years he retreated to Island Cottage, Wittersham, Kent. In 1908–1910 he suffered a mental collapse in Italy, moving in and out of asylums; he chronicles this experience in Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). He recovered and resumed his literary career until his seventies, mainly regurgitating themes of his fin-de-siècle period. He died on 22 January 1945.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

The Introduction first considers the etymological and historical meanings of decadence. Different interpretations of the word “decadence” point to historical decline, social decay, and aesthetic inferiority. Decadence today may be best understood as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity, which first arose in nineteenth-century France and is best expressed by the author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Decadence then “travelled” to London, where Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) became the preeminent decadent writer. Other metropolitan centers that made up part of the urban geography of decadence during the fifty-year period (1880–1930) of decadence’s peak were fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin.

From Hérodias to Hérodiade: Massenet’s Idiosyncratic Take on the Salomé Myth

Adaptation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-58
Author(s):  
Phaedra Claeys
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Grand Opera

AbstractMassenet’s Hérodiade (1881) is today one of the lesser-known variations of the Salomé myth. Although based on Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877) and written and premiered at the height of the narrative’s popularity, the opera displays some peculiar deviations from both Flaubert’s tale and other, especially fin-de-siècle, renderings of the myth. By situating Hérodiade’s departures from Flaubert’s short story within both the framework of operatic conventions and the broader context of the opera’s genesis, this article highlights Hérodiade’s status as a self-contained rendering, rather than a mere dramatic rewriting of the story—let alone an unfaithful adaptation. In doing so, three main elements that played an essential role in the process of (re)creation are brought to attention: the conventions of grand opera, Massenet’s own aesthetics and interpretation of the tale, and the impact of the socio-political context of France’s Third Republic on the opera’s development.

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