Controversies in the Periodical Press

2021 ◽  
pp. 164-205
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Henry James ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Class Privilege

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.

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
World Citizenship ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Heated Debate

Derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, cosmopolitanism offers a radical alternative to identities and cultural practices built on the idea of the nation: cosmopolitans imagine themselves instead as part of a global community that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries. This book argues that fin-de-siècle writing in English witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. It offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a field of controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light a variety of literary responses. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness. It investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents English-language literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-140
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
German Population ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Weimar Culture

This is a fascinating book, partly because of the excellent contributions, and partly because of the ways in which the editors have chosen to engage the topic and organize their volume. Marchand and Lindenfeld open the collection with a loaded question: Was there a German fin de siècle? Did Germans, in other words, share the kinds of reactions to modernity that have so fascinated historians of Austria and France? Their answer is yes and no. Many German intellectuals embraced the modernist currents Carl Schorske identified more than forty years ago in his work on fin de siècle Vienna, reacting to the depressing problems of modernization in ways similar to their Austrian counterparts. And yet much of the German population was largely unbowed by their putatively perplexing condition. As the editors argue, despite the worries of many an intellectual, “the later Wilhelmine world was characterized by enormous ambition and optimism, booming industries and bustling new urban spaces, cultural and political activism on a new scale, and the promise, if not the immediate realization, of a ‘place in the sun’ on the world stage” (p. 1). That optimism is the perplexing bit, because many of us, schooled in the dark side of Weimar culture and its intellectual antecedents, have learned to imagine Germans at the end of the nineteenth century (or at least our favorite representatives) as people caught up in a pessimistic, existential, Nietzschean funk. Indeed, the editors themselves have not avoided that position entirely.

A COMPLETE REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND AN ABSTRACT OF THE WORLD LITERATURE. SEVEN CASE REPORTS

Medicine ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wm. F. ASHE ◽  
H. R. PRATT-THOMAS ◽  
C. W. KUMPE
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
The World

scholarly journals The image of the “horror” world in the “Fin de siècle” prose (Mikhail Artsybashev, Fyodor Sologub, Leonid Andreyev)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-129
Author(s):  
Tatyana Alexandrovna Khitarova ◽  
Elena Georgievna Khitarova
Keyword(s):  
World Order ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Literary Process

The article examines the problem of typological features of the chronotope of the prose of the writers of the “Fin de siècleˮ, who defined the model of the world order in the image of the “horror worldˮ. The goal is analysis of the prose samples of the middle epic of Mikhail Artsybashev, Fyodor Sologub (Teternikov), Leonid Andreyev. Perversion, the corporeality of the depicted reality are the main chronotopic features found in all the literary texts involved for consideration. As we can conclude, the writers of the “Fin de siècleˮ really do make fear and horror a constantly sounding plot-forming motif. However, this constant motif for the literary process of the turn of the century sounds in a unique personal key. The writers offer their own architecture of the image of the “horrorˮ. Thus, the sound of the fear motif is an artistic characteristic of the text, it determines both the dominant of its poetics, and the worldview and attitude of the creator of the text.

scholarly journals Ibsen in Russia Revisited: The Ibsenian Legacy in the Writings of the Russian Symbolist Andrey Bely

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lillian Jorunn Helle
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Significant Source ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Creative Development ◽  
The World ◽  
Andrey Bely ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Many

The intellectual atmosphere of Russian fin de siècle was characterized by a strong fascination for Norway, its nature, its culture and its literature. A good example is Henrik Ibsen who was a significant source of inspiration for Russian dramatists, writers and poets. The Russian symbolists in particular saw Ibsen as a tutelary spirit and not least the “younger” symbolist Andrey Bely regarded his works and thoughts as a prefiguration and a foreshadowing of his own. Ibsen was important to Bely through all his various stages of intellectual, artistic and spiritual seeking and in accordance with Bely’s highly interpretative, hermeneutical approach to the world, in which everything he experienced was transformed to confirm his own symbolist Weltanschauung, also Ibsen was transformed in much the same manner. And the very intriguing way in which Bely rewrites the Norwegian playwright into his own writings will be the main topic of this article, illustrating how the Russian symbolist refigures the Norwegian dramatist to make him fit into his own continuous search for new and meaningful perspectives and positions. Moreover and even still more remarkable, this search convincingly demonstrates how the Ibsenian legacy throughout the many different phases of Bely’s creative development keeps it crucial place within Bely’s life cycle, thereby establishing a most interesting thread in the complex web of Ibsen’s Wirkungsgeschichte.

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

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.

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