Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall

2020 ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
Peter T. A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Music Hall

Liberated Women and Travesty Fetishes: Conflicting Representations of Gender in Parisian Fin-de-Siècle Music-Hall Ballet

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Sarah Gutsche-Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Liberated Women

This article explores the multiple and often contradictory representations of women in Parisian music-hall ballets staged at the turn of the twentieth century as reflections of shifting conceptions of women's social roles in fin-de-siècle France. Music-hall ballets mirrored both the broadening of gender norms and the societal fears which accompanied these changing social mores; they helped reinforce shifting perceptions of women while simultaneously undermining them. Created at a rate of six or seven per year for fun-loving socialites, music-hall productions were as up-to-date as they were ephemeral, serving as an unusually direct theatrical barometer of middle- and upper-class Parisians’ tastes and values.

The moral sense of the majorities: indecency and vigilance in Late-Victorian music halls

Popular Music ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy C. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Insight Into

Although known as the ‘Naughty Nineties’, the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects deeply conservative, not only in bureaucratic responses to these sexual controversies but also in the creation of political organisations to represent and lobby for conventional moral values. Social purity campaigners' efforts to eradicate indecency in music-hall performance fits into this pattern, and provides insight into the continuity between the class politics of leisure reforms, control of artistic production and hegemonic sexual mores.

scholarly journals Music Hall, Jigs and Strippers: English Low-Brow Music in French Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-414
Author(s):  
Hannah Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Jules Valles ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Textual Form

Abstract It is a commonplace to remark that nineteenth-century England was a land without music. Yet French travel writers in the fin de siècle remark again and again on their astonishing, low-brow musical encounters in the nation’s capital. The present article examines such experiences in the writing of Jules Vallès and Hector France, as they turn their steps away from the refinement of Covent Garden to seek out more esoteric musical experiences in the music halls, tawdry bars, minor theatres and strip joints of London. These texts present an intriguing and ambivalent textual form to the reader. Though being based on – and structured as – travel anecdotes, they no less insistently reach beyond the anecdotal experience to extrapolate overarching conclusions about the English and their character relative to France. Yet in doing so, their texts reveal inconsistencies and contradictions as they try to reconcile these strange musical experiences with the stereotypes of Englishness that had solidified over the generations; these alien musical experiences resist conceptualization and challenge the tropes that had for so long underwritten French ideas of the English Other.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Medical Humanism and Blackwood’s Magazine at the Fin de Siècle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Coyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Medical Humanism

If Blackwood’s helped to generate a recuperative medical humanism in the first half of the nineteenth century, what was its legacy? This ‘Coda’ turns to the fin de siècle to trace some key examples of a resurgence of the magazine’s mode of medical humanism at a time of perceived crisis for the medical profession, when many began ‘to worry that the transformation of medicine into a science, as well as the epistemological and technical successes of the new sciences, may have been bought at too great a price’....

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