Domesticating Decadence: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, and Their Invisible English Translators

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-472
Author(s):  
Colton Valentine
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Pierre Louys ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
A Current

Abstract Decadence eludes definition, but critics tend to concur on the movement’s transgressive and uncommercial status in the British literary field. This essay questions those associations by exploring a current of archetypal decadent French novels translated by and marketed to a mainstream Anglophone audience: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s En Route (1895, trans. 1896) and La cathédrale (1898, trans. 1898) and Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite: Mœurs antiques (1896, trans. 1900 and 1906) and La femme et le pantin (1898, trans. 1908). By reading letters, memoirs, and prefaces alongside periodical reviews and a publisher’s archive, the essay sheds light on the novels’ invisible translators and reveals the fiscal and legal viability of “domesticated decadence.” Doing so models how translation studies and book-historical methods can revise deep-set tenets of literary history. These “poisonous” epitomes of the fin de siècle in fact circulated freely across the Channel, reaching more than the happy few.

scholarly journals Portugal's First Queer Novel: Rediscovering Visconde de Vila-Moura's Nova Safo (1912)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Klobucka
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Marginal Status

This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel. Given the extremely limited number and scope of existing critical approaches to the text, my reading is oriented by a reparative strategy that aims, first and foremost, to remedy its precarious status as an archival object. I describe the novel's inchoate and cluttered collection of references, images, and storylines as a countercultural scrapbook of queer feeling, ruled by an antiquarian sensibility, whose structures of cohesion belong less to the realm of formal aesthetics than to the sphere of homophilic affective epistemology. Further, I chart Nova Safo's intersecting gestures of transitive embodiment—transnational, transgender, and transracial—by discussing the novel’s mournful evocation of three recently departed icons of fin-de-siècle literary culture: Oscar Wilde, Renée Vivien, and João da Cruz e Sousa.

Decadence and Institutions of Modernism in the American Literary Field of the 1910s and 1920s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten MacLeod
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Account ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Book Sales ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter examines the tensions between ‘make it new’ modernists and ‘decadent modernists’. These tensions are traced through a detailed account of the institutions of publishing in Britain and American. Attention is given to the elaborately decorated books associated with fin-de-siècle culture. Evidence is also provided to show that at this time it was decadent writers who were enjoying greater success, in terms of book sales, than modernists.

scholarly journals Volkskuns en fin de siêcle: Perspektiewe op parallelle tendense in die Vlaamse en Afrikaanse prosa

Literator ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Roos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
The Aesthetic

In nineteenth century Europe, the fin de siécle was in a literary sense characterized by the aesthetic cult, Symbolism , and a decadent mood . However, the traditional historians of Flemish and Afrikaans literature accentuate the mild romanticism and realism as typical of what have since become, for a corresponding period (± 1895-1925), in both those literatures their canonized texts. Literary history also identifies in Flemish and Afrikaans prose a definite striving towards a ‘national’ literature, thus reflecting the nationalistic political and cultural movements of those early times. This article focusses on a few, but interesting deviations from that established pattern. It reveals that, especially in works of prose written by surprisingly many of those authors (who were often identified with a ‘national’ cause), some marked tendencies of the decadent fin de siêcle are clearly present. A contextual rereading of these texts - which even now are either completely under-estimated or ignored by conventional literary history - may bring about a re-evaluation of the existing canon of early Flemish and Afrikaans prose.

The Perils of Reading Fiction: the Female Quixote and the Thai New Woman

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Thosaeng Chaochuti
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Woman Reader

Abstract British literary history routinely associated women with reading fiction, especially the novel. This association seemingly threatened male hegemony and cultural authority. It led, therefore, to the portrayal of the woman reader as a female quixote who was prone to misreading and being misled by what she read. This representation became popular during the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the New Woman's emergence at the fin-de-siècle. Similar developments took place in Siam/Thailand where the birth of fiction, the advent of the woman reader, and the New Woman's rise roughly coincided in the late 1910s and early 1920s. By examining San Thewarak's novel Bandai haeng khwam rak [Stairways to Love] (1932), this paper demonstrates the trope of the female quixote's invocation to describe the emerging Thai (New) Woman reader and the threat that she embodied that had to be managed and controlled.

Lulu and/or Geschwitz Idealized, in the symphonic pieces from “Lulu” and Elsewhere

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-114
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Ernst Krenek ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
A Current

This chapter treats an immediate context for censorship, here of Berg’s libretto for Lulu by authorities in Nazi Germany, and direct consequences of that action. The chapter discusses a current in Berg’s Lulu and reactions to it traceable to a particular interpretation of “fin-de-siècle decadence”: a tendency in the opera and its initial reception by a group of critics close to Berg—Willi Reich, Theodor Adorno, Willi Schuh, and Ernst Krenek—to turn Lulu into an idealized abstraction, a symbol of musical beauty in decay at the turn of the century, and to represent the music itself as absolute. This trend found necessary expression in the Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” in 1934, which Berg arranged in response to the rejection of his libretto, but it is also discernible in a sketch that can be dated to the period of his earliest ideas about the opera.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine M. Guy
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Distinct Period

This chapter provides an overview of critical histories of the fin de siècle outlining some of the key concepts associated with defining this period in literary history. It explores the relationship between global, national and regional understandings of the fin de siècle, and poses questions about the utility of the term ‘fin de siècle’ as marking out a distinct period in literary history. The Introduction also provides brief summaries of each of the following chapters in the volume.

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