scholarly journals JACK LONDON, THE SOCIALIST DREAM OF A YOUNG POET.

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-112
Author(s):  
Jesús Isaías Gómez López
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Jack London ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Personal Decision ◽  
Complete Poems

Jack London began writing poetry in May 1897. From then on, the lyrical process, in the form of odd, single lines, stanzas and complete poems, would be present throughout his career as a novelist, essayist and short-story writer. His most ambitiously prolific period was between 1897 and 1899, and by the age of twenty-three he had already composed and published most of his poems. London’s incursion into poetry was not fortuitous, but instead was a deliberate, personal decision to enter what he hoped would be a lucrative profession. This began in May 1897, with the poem “Effusion”, which launched what was to be a short but vibrant poetic career. London’s poetry is replete with a wide variety of issues and captures the most intimate and existential expression of a young man who aspired to make poetry the literary and vocational tool with which to become a crucial figure in the promising socialist movement of the fin de siècle.

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.

From Hérodias to Hérodiade: Massenet’s Idiosyncratic Take on the Salomé Myth

Adaptation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-58
Author(s):  
Phaedra Claeys
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Grand Opera

AbstractMassenet’s Hérodiade (1881) is today one of the lesser-known variations of the Salomé myth. Although based on Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877) and written and premiered at the height of the narrative’s popularity, the opera displays some peculiar deviations from both Flaubert’s tale and other, especially fin-de-siècle, renderings of the myth. By situating Hérodiade’s departures from Flaubert’s short story within both the framework of operatic conventions and the broader context of the opera’s genesis, this article highlights Hérodiade’s status as a self-contained rendering, rather than a mere dramatic rewriting of the story—let alone an unfaithful adaptation. In doing so, three main elements that played an essential role in the process of (re)creation are brought to attention: the conventions of grand opera, Massenet’s own aesthetics and interpretation of the tale, and the impact of the socio-political context of France’s Third Republic on the opera’s development.

“A BEAUTIFUL TRANSLATION FROM A VERY IMPERFECT ORIGINAL”: MABEL WOTTON, AESTHETICISM, AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY BORROWING

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Anderson Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Own Name

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton's short story, “The Fifth Edition” (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, “If you really think there is any good in it . . . it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or . . . you must take it” (179). Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, re-writes, and then publishes it under his own name, he hasn't done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby's subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden's actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture. As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton's fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the “shady commerce between art and truth” (6) makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde, and James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.

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.

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