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.

scholarly journals From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Juliet Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
French Art ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Understanding ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

scholarly journals ‘A portion of truth’: Demarcating the boundaries of scientific hypnotism in late nineteenth-century France

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Kim M. Hajek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Legitimacy ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In fin-de-siècle France, hypnotism enjoyed an unprecedented level of medico-scientific legitimacy. Researchers studying hypnotism had nonetheless to manage relations between their new ‘science’ and its widely denigrated precursor, magnétisme animal , because too great a resemblance between the two could damage the reputation of ‘scientific’ hypnotism. They did so by engaging in the rhetorical activity of boundary-work. This paper analyses such demarcation strategies in major texts from the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools – the rival groupings that dominated enquiry into hypnotism in the 1880s. Researchers from both Schools depicted magnétisme as ‘unscientific’ by emphasizing the magnetizers’ tendency to interpret phenomena in wondrous or supernatural terms. At the same time, they acknowledged and recuperated the ‘portions of truth’ hidden within the phantasmagoria of magnétisme ; these ‘portions’ function as positive facts in the texts on hypnotism, immutable markers of an underlying natural order that accounts for similarities between phenomena of magnétisme and hypnotism. If this strategy allows for both continuities and discontinuities between the two fields, it also constrains the scope for theoretical speculation about hypnotism, as signalled, finally, by a reading of one fictional study of the question, Anatole France's ‘Monsieur Pigeonneau’.

scholarly journals The Male Wound in Fin-de-Siècle Poetry

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Sarah Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ.

scholarly journals Volkskuns en fin de siêcle: Perspektiewe op parallelle tendense in die Vlaamse en Afrikaanse prosa

Literator ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Roos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
The Aesthetic

In nineteenth century Europe, the fin de siécle was in a literary sense characterized by the aesthetic cult, Symbolism , and a decadent mood . However, the traditional historians of Flemish and Afrikaans literature accentuate the mild romanticism and realism as typical of what have since become, for a corresponding period (± 1895-1925), in both those literatures their canonized texts. Literary history also identifies in Flemish and Afrikaans prose a definite striving towards a ‘national’ literature, thus reflecting the nationalistic political and cultural movements of those early times. This article focusses on a few, but interesting deviations from that established pattern. It reveals that, especially in works of prose written by surprisingly many of those authors (who were often identified with a ‘national’ cause), some marked tendencies of the decadent fin de siêcle are clearly present. A contextual rereading of these texts - which even now are either completely under-estimated or ignored by conventional literary history - may bring about a re-evaluation of the existing canon of early Flemish and Afrikaans prose.

Sea and structure in fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Malcolm Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Sea Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The One ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

A copious sea literature exists in nineteenth-century France, and the works of such figures as Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet and Rimbaud contain a recurrent tension between two divergent views of maritime experience. On the one hand, the sea offers the encouraging spectacle of endless possibility and plurality, but on the other hand it is an emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable natural world. In major works by Mallarmé (1842–98) and Debussy (1862–1918) this contradiction is placed centre stage. The poet and the musician have found ingenious ways of maintaining intellectual and artistic control while constructing ‘open’ textures designed to recreate the sensations of chaos and contingency. In both works – Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) and La Mer (1905) – the remorseless action of the sea is associated with the periodic achievement and loss of aesthetic structure.

Imagining Socialism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Women's Emancipation ◽  
Cooperative Labor ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Radical Activism

“Socialism” names a form of collective life that has never been fully realized; consequently, it is best understood as a goal to be imagined. So this study argues, and thereby locates an aesthetic impulse that animates some of the most consequential socialist writing, thought, and practice of the long nineteenth century. Imagining Socialism explores this tradition of radical activism, investigating the diverse ways that British socialists from Robert Owen to the midcentury Christian Socialists to William Morris marshalled the resources of the aesthetic in their efforts to surmount “politics” and develop nongovernmental forms of collective life. Their ambitious attempts at social regeneration led some socialists to explore the liberatory potential afforded by cooperative labor, women’s emancipation, political violence—and the power of the fine arts themselves. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that, far from being confined to the “socialist revival” of the fin de siècle, important socialist experiments with the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic may be found throughout the period it calls the “socialist century”—and may still inspire us today.

scholarly journals “SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD”: SPIRITUALISM AND IDENTITY IN THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elana Gomel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
British Association ◽  
Material World ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Oliver Lodge ◽  
To Receive

BOOKS ARE SOMETIMES published posthumously. In the nineteenth century, books were occasionally written posthumously when spiritualist mediums claimed to receive communications from the spirits of famous writers anxious to keep in touch with their public from beyond the grave. Oscar Wilde wrote his last book twenty-six years after his death, Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages (1926), edited by Hester Travers Smith, the medium who received the messages while in trance and inscribed them through the process known as “automatic writing.” The book was highly regarded in the spiritualist community, boasting a preface by Sir William Barrett, a famous physicist, a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and – along with a number of other illustrious men of science such as physicists Sir William Crookes and Oliver Lodge as well as biologist Alfred Russell Wallace – a convert to spiritualism.

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’....

Fin-de-Siècle Salonica

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
New Institutions

This chapter discusses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's childhood in the ancient Macedonian capital of Salonica. The future founder of the Turkish Republic was born one winter, either in 1880 or in 1881. His upbringing was more liberal than that of most lower-class Muslims. No one in his family's circle of friends and relatives, for instance, practiced polygamy. Likewise, his father reportedly drank alcohol, which was abhorred by conservatives. The confusing dualism produced in Ottoman society by the reforms of the nineteenth century had its first imprint on Mustafa when his parents entered into a heated argument about his education. There is little doubt that Mustafa Kemal's deep-seated predilection for new institutions and practices owed much to his years as one of a handful of students in the empire who had their primary education at a private elementary school devoid of a strong religious focus.

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