Victorian Drydown and Sillage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter considers the reception of the Victorian perfumed legacy by examining two contrasting early twentieth-century literary responses to perfume and decadence by Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. Woolf had little personal contact with the culture of decadence, her diary displaying her puritanism and distrust of perfume. Later in life her novel Flush (1933) allows her a rapprochement with Victorian literature and smell, while her memoirs show her becoming more accommodating of her sensory self. In contrast, Mackenzie had a relaxed attitude towards Victorian decadence, perfume, and smell, and enjoyed the literature of the fin de siècle. This liberal response is expressed in his autobiography, various essays, and his two most important early novels Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14), where his protagonists reveal his skill as an ‘aromancer’, adept at using scented memories and impressions to underscore the key moments and experiences in an individual’s life.

Inconclusions

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-227
Author(s):  
Koenraad Claes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Victorian Age

This chapter provides a summary of the argument of the book and of the history developed therein of the little magazine genre in Britain from 1850 (the Germ) to 1901 (the folding of the Page). A glance ahead at the coming Edwardian interlude and the later modernist period indicates that early-twentieth-century titles such as Rhythm (1911–13), BLAST (1914–15) and the Little Review (1914–29) were faced by the same challenges as their Victorian predecessors. As is shown, some of the most famous modernist detractors of the Victorian age were actually aware that their journals were part of the legacy of the Fin-de-Siècle periodicals treated in this book, even though they often disowned this connection.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
International Reputation

The Introduction outlines the scope and range of this study of perfume in Victorian literary culture, defining its terms and explaining its specific links with aestheticism and decadence during 1860–1900, the period in which British perfumery developed, expanded, and gained an international reputation. It also explains the important links between perfume and literary language, surveys various kinds of modern writing about smell and perfume, and indicates the relatively small amount of critical writing on olfaction in Victorian literature. Finally, signalling the broadly chronological organization of this monograph, it provides detailed chapter summaries which trace an evolutionary movement from Romantic poetry and early and mid-Victorian fiction to aestheticism, decadence, and the literature of the fin de siècle, ending with Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie, two early twentieth-century novelists whose works provide contrasting reactions to Victorian scented literature and perfumed decadence.

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Drug Induced ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

French Folk Songs and the Invention of History

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindhumathi Revuluri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
History Writing ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.

scholarly journals Novák's Lucerna and the Historiographical Problem of "Czech Modernism"

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-112
Author(s):  
Brian Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Czech Music ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Stylistic Influences ◽  
The Aesthetic

The opera Lucerna (premièred 1923) by the Czech composer Vitězslav Novák demonstrates the problematic position of Czech music in the historiography of the early twentieth century, since neither "avant-garde" nor "antimodernist" suffice for it as stylistic labels. A leader of Czech modernism during the fin de siècle, Novák's music embodies the aesthetic crisis his generation faced after 1918. Lucerna's score reveals a complex negotiation of multiple stylistic influences, including impressionism, folklore, and Strauss, paralleling the Czech community's hesitant acceptance of international modernism in the early interwar period. The opera's lack-lustre finale echoes the contemporaneous return to Czech traditional values, using Smetana as an anachronistic model for modernist opera.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-229
Author(s):  
Soledad Quereilhac
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Legitimation ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Growth Of Science

This chapter analyzes the uses and appropriations of scientific discourse in Argentine magazines from the fin de siècle: a period in which literary modernism coincided with the development of spiritualisms that aspired to the status of science (or “occult sciences”) like Spiritism and Theosophy. The aim is to examine concrete examples that relativize the sharp division between science, art, and spiritualism in the culture of this period. The main sources explored are La Quincena. Revista de letras (1893–1899), Philadelphia (1898–1902), La Verdad (1905–1911), and Constancia (1890–1905). In addition, the chapter focuses on how the astonishing growth of science in Argentina, as well as the social legitimation of scientific discourses, influenced other fields, giving shape to new literary expressions, beliefs, and utopian projections that synthesized the material and the spiritual.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

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