In the Eye of the Beholder

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sos Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Theatrical Representations

Decadence, an unhealthy deviation from an undefined norm, is necessarily in the eye of the beholder, and this was never more apparent than in theatrical representations of the modern woman. Through analyzing the performance history and reception of two fin-de-siècle plays centered on a rebellious woman—Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) and Sudermann’s Magda (1893)—this article examines the instability of the notion of decadence as applied to the heroines of avant-garde drama. As professionals, themselves negotiating assumptions about their sexual and moral status as public performers, the actresses who chose to perform these roles were well aware of the artistic and moral debates that surrounded them. Their performances can thus be understood as active interventions in debates about literary, cultural, and social notions of decadence and the role of women within them.

When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hindson
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Collaboration Networks ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Leisure Industry ◽  
Theatrical Culture

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.

The 1890s Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jad Adams
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Double Standards ◽  
The Real ◽  
New Women ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Independent Life ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Sexual Double Standards

This chapter takes a fresh look at the role of women in the fin de siècle, with a focus on their role in publishing—as authors, as subjects and as editors. It shows that while this industry provided opportunities for women, they were also exploited, and that there was little evidence of female solidarity among the real ‘new women’ of the time. It also emphasises the sexual double-standards that obtained, and the price many women paid for seeking an independent life, noting that while some enjoyed significant professional success, few found lasting personal happiness.

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.

Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between performance culture in two regional cities in the British Midlands—Nottingham and Birmingham—as compared to that in the metropolis, London. It compares reactions to plays by Ibsen and Pinero in these locales, providing evidence to suggest that regional audiences were knowledgeable about London culture, and that they were less shocked by avant-garde theatre than might be assumed.

Symons, Arthur William (1865–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Boyiopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
French Symbolism ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Story Writer

Arthur Symons was a British poet, art and literary critic, memoirist, playwright, short story writer, and editor. He was born in Milford Haven, Wales, on 28 February 1865, the son of Cornish parents: Reverend Mark Symons (1824–1898), a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Lydia Pascoe (1828–1896). Symons was the foremost exponent of Decadence and the leading promoter of French Symbolism in Britain. An enthused socialite, he manoeuvred successfully through London artistic circles and the Paris avant-garde. In 1901 he married Rhoda Bowser (1874–-1936) and in his later years he retreated to Island Cottage, Wittersham, Kent. In 1908–1910 he suffered a mental collapse in Italy, moving in and out of asylums; he chronicles this experience in Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). He recovered and resumed his literary career until his seventies, mainly regurgitating themes of his fin-de-siècle period. He died on 22 January 1945.

Reconsidering Joyce's Exiles in its Theatrical Context

2003 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIRSTEN SHEPHERD-BARR
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Key Questions

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.

scholarly journals Avantgarde Suomessa

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
First Time

Avant-garde in Finland is the first book to provide an overarching introduction to avant-garde art by Finnish artists. The articles in the book discuss the application and development of the cultural ideas of the avant-garde in Finnish art from the early 20th century till the present day. The book focusses on the social, political, and artistic characteristics of avant-garde art and their manifestation in Finnish avant-garde literature, visual arts, architecture, fashion, and music. The book shows the remarkable role of women artists in the development of the Finnish avant-garde. Many artists and groups are presented in the book for the first time. At the same time, the articles highlight connections between well-known Finnish artists and international avant-garde movements that have not been recognized in earlier research. A key theme of the book is the tension between the internationality of avant-garde and the nationalist elements of Finnish culture. The book is peer-reviewed, and its authors are eminent senior scholars and younger researchers.

From Metapsychology to Magnetic Gnosis: An Esoteric Context for Interpreting Traumatic Modes of Transcendence in Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary and Elizabeth Severn's The Discovery of the Self

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-323
Author(s):  
John Boyle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Clinical Diary ◽  
Clinical Diary ◽  
Mutual Analysis ◽  
Academic Study

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.

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