WILL TATTERSDILL. Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press.

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.

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Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

Gender, Technology and the New Woman ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416269.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Lena Wånggren

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New Woman ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Periodical Press ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

The New Woman ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Self Formation

The second chapter examines the link between the New Woman and the typewriter, a technology which proved one of the most significant means for women to enter the offices at the Victorian fin de siècle. The chapter provides a historical and literary account of both the machine and its operator, through reading fictional works as well as trade journals and other periodical press of the time. As the typewriter came into widespread use in the late nineteenth century, the New Woman typist became a recurrent literary motif. Reading Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897) and Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), the chapter emphasises a kind of secretarial agency formulated in these works, in which the New Woman typist figure appropriates the typewriter as a means of self-formation.

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The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408912.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alison Chapman

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Periodical Press ◽

Graphic Arts ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines the innovative use of print and illustration in the publishing of poetry in late nineteenth-century magazines. It shows how print and illustration were used to build a coherence or unity of the graphic arts, which in turn helped mark out a distinctive audience for such poetry. It explains the ways in which 1890s poetry was contingent on its graphic treatment in its print context, highlighting the richness of the decorative poetics of this period.

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Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

10.1093/oso/9780198864240.001.0001 ◽

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.

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Personating the Ripper: Civilian Performance and the Melodramatic Mode

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film ◽

10.1177/1748372719861610 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 46 (2) ◽

pp. 190-209 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sophie Duncan

Keyword(s):

United Kingdom ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Periodical Press ◽

Female Victims ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Popular Performance

This article illuminates how the Ripper murders and their 1888 coverage re-theatricalised not only London, but many provincial towns. It looks beyond canonical theatrical contexts for, and responses to the Ripper, exploring extra-theatrical, popular performance ‘scenarios’ by civilian men, outside professional sites of theatricalised or medicalised spectatorship. It examines how civilian men personated key figures in the Ripper ‘scenario’: the plain-clothes detective, the Ripper's female victims, and the Ripper himself. These civilian performances illuminate our understandings of fin-de-siècle masculinity and its intersections with the melodramatic mode in theatre and culture. Simultaneously interrogating these performances through the lenses of fin-de-siècle theatre culture, the periodical press, and the anthropology of ritual magic reveals the cultural complexities of the ‘personations’ happening in streets and homes across the United Kingdom.

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