scholarly journals Personating the Ripper: Civilian Performance and the Melodramatic Mode

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-209 ◽  
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.

The Historical Foundations of Judicial Review in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-230
Author(s):  
Conor McCormick
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Administrative Actions

This chapter analyses judicially developed standards for reviewing administrative actions in the United Kingdom between 1890 and 1910. By exploring the context, reach, types, and frequency of judicial review during that timeframe—fin de siècle—this historical analysis reveals both significant changes and significant continuities by comparison with twenty-first century standards. The chapter concentrates in particular on reported cases which undermine the Diceyan claim that administrative law did not exist in the United Kingdom during this timeframe; and reflects on the inconsistencies that pervaded that body of law. It concludes that some judges tended to deploy concepts which had the effect of restraining administrative actions, whereas other judicial constructs tended to facilitate the administrative arrangements contested in court. As such, it recommends that the role of judicial review at this time should be characterized with this duality of purpose firmly in mind.

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.

Typewriters and Typists: Secretarial Agency at the Fin de Siècle

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.

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

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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