Self-Consuming Socialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-155
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Young Professionals ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Social Problem Novel

This chapter provides a comprehensive reassessment of the most vocal advocates of socialism in Britain at midcentury, the Christian Socialists. In the revolutionary year 1848, a group of young professionals and clergymen resolved to address working-class discontent. Inspired by the egalitarian theology of their leader, the Anglican Divine Frederick Denison Maurice, they set out to “Christianize Socialism.” Refuting the oft-repeated claim that the movement was inauthentic because it discouraged working-class political engagement, this chapter’s analysis contextualizes Christian Socialist doctrine in light of scholarship on the diversity—and, in many cases, religiosity—of nineteenth-century socialism. Moreover, it reveals that the group’s signature anti-political undertaking, the sponsorship of cooperative workshops, the “Working Men’s Associations,” owes a quiet debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic philosophy. While maintaining that the Christian Socialists deserve to be taken seriously qua socialism, this chapter nevertheless identifies several deep-seated antinomies in their project. Through a reading of Charles Kingsley’s influential social problem novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850), it explores the fundamental incongruities between not only the group’s Anglican Christianity and its socialism, but also its militant affect and resolutely moderate intentions. These contradictions doomed the movement to be a “self-consuming socialism”—an outcome eerily prefigured by Kingsley’s predilection for the topos of cannibalism. Finally, a brief coda considers the group’s legacy and impact on Britain’s “socialist revival” at the fin de siècle.

Vagrant Servants as Disease Vectors: Regulation of Migrant Maidservants in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
Ambika Natarajan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Disease Vectors ◽  
Migrant Women ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Fin De Siècle

AbstractThis article centers on the persistent notion that female domestics are vulnerable to prostitution. Focusing on Vienna in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the article highlights the underlying fallacies of this notion. The 1810 Vienna Servant Code created a system of policing that made it easier for officials to collect data on maidservants. Compounded by problems in classification, maidservants seemed to form a major contingent in police prostitution data. The data enabled physicians to justify extending their authority over the private lives of a swelling population of occupationally diverse working-class migrant women in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

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.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

OOK DE VIS MOET DUUR BETALEN

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-247
Author(s):  
Lucie Sedláčková
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Sentient Beings ◽  
Animal Agency

THE FISH HAVE TO PAY DEARLY AS WELL The representations of animals and vegetarianism in the works of Herman Heijermans and other socially engaged writers of the fin de siècle At the end of the nineteenth century, the perception of animals changed significantly due to the theory of evolution and other new ideas, which also affected a number of Dutch socialist-leaning writers. Utilizing the framework of literary animal studies, this article investigates how animals were represented in their works. Most of the examined writers present animals as sentient beings, which is also ref lected by their speaking out in favour of vegetarianism. Herman Heijermans takes a more ambivalent position: some of his writings show the possibility of animal agency, whereas in others, animals are subordinate to people’s needs and are objectified.

scholarly journals The Scientific Supernatural in the Fin de Siècle Novel

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kathryn Magaña
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Validity ◽  
Material World ◽  
Scientific Legacy ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Understanding Of Science

<p>Nineteenth-century literary criticism has mainly focused on lasting scientific advancements, at the expense of a more comprehensive history, when examining the legacy of science in fiction. Yet there were many sciences that were considered plausible during the nineteenth century which have since been disproven and the ideas relegated to the realms of pseudo-science. This thesis examines novels by Bram Stoker, Marie Corelli, Florence Marryat, and Arthur Machen with attention to the scientific supernatural. Throughout this thesis, the term “scientific supernatural” will be used to reference mid- to late nineteenth-century scientific investigations conducted by various types of scientists into the supernatural and the set of phenomena that were the subject of these investigations, regardless of the twenty-first century status of the topics under investigation. Phenomena such as mesmerism, clairvoyance, and Spiritualism, which seem to be supernatural in their interactions with material aspects of the world or the supernatural realm, were studied by scientists with the understanding that they were engaged in scientific pursuits. “Scientific supernatural” is, therefore, intended to represent the scientific inquiries into the supernatural and only the areas of study that were, for a time at least, accepted as scientific by some scientists and often by society at large, evident in scientific periodicals, books, and personal documents, into the fin de siècle. Many supernatural elements in literature at the end of the nineteenth century are representations of phenomena that were being investigated by contemporary scientists and, as such, are represented within fiction as having a claim to scientific validity. This term represents the status of the various phenomena in the historical moment where the supernatural realm seemed to be the next place for science to explore.  This thesis is separated into an introduction and three chapters that discuss different depictions of the scientific supernatural. The Introduction surveys criticism of the scientific supernatural and of science in connection with late nineteenth-century literature to lay a foundation of the historical context for this science and establish a gap in current criticism of science and the fin de siècle novel. Chapter 1 explores two different representations of Spiritualism and the way the authors use science to support the worldviews taught through their fiction. The novels discussed in Chapter 2 deal with observed effects of the supernatural in the material world and the problem of explaining these occurrences when science had no certain explanation for them. Chapter 3 examines fictional depictions of scientific experimentation that represent the author’s hope that scientific evidence of the supernatural will be uncovered. In each case, the authors suggest there is something yet to be discovered which will allow science to explain the supernatural as definitely real and capable of interacting with the material world.  Fictional representations of the scientific supernatural such as those discussed throughout this thesis reveal a wider understanding of science at the fin de siècle than has previously been addressed in literary criticism. As such, this thesis suggests the need for a broader critical understanding of science, and scientific potential, that mirrors that of fin de siècle English conception of science to more fully inform the scientific legacy left in fiction of the time.</p>

The Irish Fin de Siècle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Markey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Work Stress ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Arts And Crafts Movement ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
War Fiction ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Land War

This chapter provides a survey of the range of cultural activity in Ireland during the late decades of the nineteenth century. It points to the importance of Irish writers in defining the Victorian fin de siècle, and the Irish backgrounds of many famous fin-de-siècle writers, especially women. Attention is given to specific forms of Irish writing, such as Land War fiction and experimental Irish drama and a distinct genre of Irish children’s fiction, as well as activities promoted by Irish revivalists, such as the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, the Feis Coil Association and traditional Celtic games. Throughout this body of work, stress is placed regeneration and a looking to the future, rather than on degeneration and endings.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document