9. After the Rougon-Macquart

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-122
Author(s):  
Brian Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Monoxide ◽  
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Fin De Siècle

‘After the Rougon-Macquart’ considers the final novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Doctor Pascal. This novel explores the themes of science and religion, renewal and rebirth. The latter theme was of personal significance to Zola, as he had recently fathered two children with his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot. Zola’s later fiction is discussed in the context of the climate of ideas in France in the fin de siècle. The writer’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair brought him glaringly into the public eye, and may indeed have led to his death: he died from carbon monoxide poisoning, suspected to be the result of foul play. His remains were interred in the Panthéon alongside Voltaire, Rousseau, and Victor Hugo.

Pierre de Coubertin: sport and ideology in the Third Republic, 1870–1914

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-171
Author(s):  
H. L. Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Organized Sport ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Organized sport was first developed in Germany in the form of the so-called Turnvereine, and in England at the public schools. It came to France later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the modern Olympic Games was a French invention, the result of the ambitions and efforts of an aristocratic admirer of England, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His ideas and attitudes were in many ways characteristic of fin-de-siècle France.

Constructing George Wyndham: Narratives of Aristocratic Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle England

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy W. Ellenberger
Keyword(s):  
Heart Attack ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Career Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Fin De Siècle

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.

Publicity, politics, and professoriate in fin-de-siècle Vienna: The misconduct of the embryologist Samuel Leopold Schenk

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 458-484
Author(s):  
Tatjana Buklijas
Keyword(s):  
Early Retirement ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Egg Maturation ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The University

This essay uses the case of the fin-de-siècle Vienna embryologist Samuel Leopold Schenk to analyze the factors at play in allegations of misconduct. In 1898, Schenk published a book titled Theorie Schenk. Einfluss auf das Geschlechtsverhältnis (Schenk’s theory. Influence on the sex ratio). The book argued that, by changing their diet, women trying to conceive could influence egg maturation and consequently select the sex of their offspring. This cross between a scientific monograph and a popular advice book received enormous publicity but also spurred first the Vienna Medical Association and then the Senate of the University of Vienna to accuse Schenk of poor science, self-advertisement, quack medical practice, and wrong publisher choice. Formal proceedings against Schenk ended in 1900 with the unusually harsh punishment of early retirement. Schenk died two years later. I examine the elements of the case, from the science of sex determination and selection, to the growth of print media and advertising within the changing demographic and political landscape of Vienna. I argue that the influence of the public, via the growing media, upon science was the main driver of the case against Schenk, but also that the case would have had a more limited impact were it not for the volatile political moment rife with anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. I draw the attention to the importance of setting cases of misconduct in the broader political history and against the key social concerns of the moment.

The Forensic Eye and the Public Mind: The Bertillon System of Crime Scene Photography

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lela Graybill
Keyword(s):  
Crime Scene ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Allan Sekula

In fin de siècle France, Alphonse Bertillon—best known for his widely adopted system of criminal identification—pursued “other applications” for judicial photography, suggesting that photography might be used to procure “an exact, complete, and impartial” view of “locales, things, and beings.” Photography, Bertillon was suggesting, could preserve a crime scene. In many ways, crime scene photography seems like the logical fulfillment of what Allan Sekula termed the “evidentiary promise” of photography. Understanding crime scene photography as a form of evidence places it in the realm of empirical science, with the photograph preserving proof of misdeeds and aiding the detective's forensic pursuit of truth. But, perhaps surprisingly, this was not the use that Bertillon foresaw for crime scene photography. Instead he suggested that crime scene photography was destined for the courtroom, and for the eyes of the jury. There it would not be a vehicle of objective proof, but rather an emotional catalyst for conviction. This paper examines the Bertillon system of crime scene photography as a rhetorical strategy calibrated for emotional impact, showing how it attempted to move viewers from the space of investigation and uncertainty to the space of conviction.

scholarly journals Medicalized Literary Criticism in Fin de Siècle Norway

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (31) ◽  
Author(s):  
Silje Haugen Warberg
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Illness Narratives ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Medical Terminology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The Public Sphere

Medicalized literary criticism was a widespread phenomenon across Europe in the decades surrounding the year 1900. The term describes varied practices of literary criticism founded on medical terminology and imagery. Critics with different professional backgrounds participated in this type of criticism, often by connecting medical analogies to established notions of fin de siècle decline and decadence. This article explores the proliferation and various uses of medicalized literary criticism in Norway in this period, including a case study of the literary criticism and discussion performed by two Norwegian psychiatrists and asylum doctors, Johan Scharffenberg and Henrik A. Th. Dedichen. I argue that these ‘medics-as-critics’ responded and contributed to the medicalized literary criticism and, by extension, to the establishment and prevalence of certain illness narratives in the public sphere.

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