The voice of an ancient spring

Street Songs ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Daniel Karlin
Keyword(s):  
Art Song ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
Underground Station ◽  
Regent's Park ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Determinate Form

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, an old beggar woman is heard singing outside Regent’s Park underground station. The song itself cannot be fixed: it is given to us, first, as a string of meaningless syllables, then ‘translated’ by the narrator of the book into an ancient, primordial song of sexual love, and then heard in the form of a modern German lied—a melancholy fin-de-siècle art-song which is inconceivable as a song sung by a beggar on a London street in 1925. The solid foundation of realism dissolves in Woolf’s playful handling, but she has good reasons for refusing to pin the song down to a single determinate form. The characters who see and hear the old woman—Peter Walsh, Rezia and Septimus Smith—do not really ‘see’ her for what she is, and do not understand that she is not begging, but offering; and they pass her by.

Aleister Crowley's Poetic Fin de Siècle: Swinburne's Legacy, Decadent Drag, and Spiritual Sex Magick

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-805
Author(s):  
Joseph Bristow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Extreme Type ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
The Voice

This article explores the extreme type of decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley developed while an undergraduate at Cambridge in the later 1890s. The discussion focuses of Crowley's desire to appear as the main legatee of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry from the 1860s and 1870s. Especially significant here is Crowley's volume White Stains, which the maverick publisher Leonard Smithers issued in a privately circulated edition in 1898. In the 1920s, Crowley acknowledged that his sexual affair with Herbert Charles (“Jerome”) Pollitt was largely responsible for introducing him to the works of English and French decadent writers. Pollitt—who gained celebrity as an aesthete, art collector, and drag artist in fin de siècle Cambridge—became the major patron of Aubrey Beardsley. In 1910 Crowley acknowledged the legacy of Pollitt's decadent influence into the two concluding faux-ghazals that appear in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which is in part modeled upon Richard Burton's translation of The Perfumed Garden (1886), based on the fifteenth-century heteroerotic manual by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi. This 1910 volume, which celebrates sodomy through the voice of an imaginary seventeenth-century Persian poet, belongs to Crowley's established interest in taboo forms of erotic experience that relate to the occult rituals he practiced in relation to sex magick.

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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