Coda

Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta

The Coda discusses the changing representations of tenancy after Dickens’s death in 1870. It moves through the fin de siècle, offerings readings of novellas by Wilkie Collins and tracing Dickens’s legacy in these texts. Collins’s novellas use rented space as a prism through which to address broad concerns about modernity. The Coda briefly notes the role of rented space in works by George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. It concludes by shifting its focus to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and considers examples from literature, film, television, and contemporary installation art, including Tatzu Nishi’s 2002 project, Villa Victoria.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

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.


2003 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIRSTEN SHEPHERD-BARR

James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.


Author(s):  
Antonio Sanna

REPRODUCING THE FIN-DE-SIECLE GOTHIC WITH TECHNO-GOTHIC VAMPIRES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ALIEN QUADRILOGY AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA'S EXILE AbstractMany critics have agreed on defining both the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker and the Alien series as horror narratives, with specific reference to the latter as a form of contemporary Gothic. Indeed, several collections of critical essays and scholarly volumes on the Gothic analyse both the work of Dracula and the Alien films. In this article, I intend to examine the similarities between Stoker's 1897 work and the four films of Alien, produced between 1979 and 1998. Specifically, I will examine the characteristics of the 1890s Gothic and refer them to the Alien films. These works can be associated to each other by comparing the scholarly work by the critics and particularly their focus on the sexual metaphors and contents present in these texts. Certainly, innumerable literary and...


Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-323
Author(s):  
John Boyle

It has been argued that the essential themes in Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1932) centre around three major axes (theoretical, technical and personal). This paper proposes a fourth: namely, an occult or esoteric axis. To make the case for its presence in the Clinical Diary, the article provides a brief introduction to the academic study of Western esotericism in order to more adequately situate its proximate fin de siècle occult precursors vis-à-vis psychoanalytic metapsychology. A brief account of Ferenczi's correspondence with Freud on the role of the occult in psychoanalysis is then provided. This constitutes the necessary context for embarking upon an investigation into the ‘psychognostic’ metapsychology co-developed during the course of Ferenczi's ‘mutual analysis’ with the so-called ‘evil genius’, Elizabeth Severn. By way of conclusion, James Grotstein's account of a ‘numinous and immanent psychoanalytic subject’ is highlighted as the locus for a synergistic rapprochement between pre-Freudian and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the subject congruent with the ‘Orphic trajectory’ outlined in this paper.


Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.


Author(s):  
Catherine Hindson

This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.


2021 ◽  
pp. 164-205
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista

This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Kamil Lipiński

The ‘fragmentary condition’ relates to Jena Romanticism as the point of departure to discuss how the idea of the fragment moves from classical, literary studies to contemporary art and becomes part of a broader interpretation of the 20th century fin de siècle aesthetics. The article builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s theoretical insights into Jena Romanticism in order to examine the unification of all genres separated from poetry to touch poetry, philosophy, rhetoric through the anecdotal and witty articulation, as well as ars combinatoria. For Romantics, the basic imperative was to educate, form their existence, that is, Bildung, in Hegelian terms, cultural education, formation, development. This literary foundation is defined by Jean-Luc Nancy as a fragmentary existence which he identifies with the fraction, fractal essence, inherent separation, disengaging. Nancy was intent on examining the emergence of various contemporary works expressing their essence in terms of breaks, incompleteness, and an autonomous role of the fragment. This classical conceptual foundation provides these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and allows for discussing the implications of the critical aesthetics of the fin de siècle for the practices of fraction, ex-peau-sition, spacing, and division in the contemporary research in art.


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