Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-siecle France (review)

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-397
Author(s):  
Dominic Janes
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Index and Time

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Lost Time

In the first decades of the twentieth century, understandings of how photographs served the study of history again changed. These changes emerged from practices at Paris’s municipal historical institutions and within publishing houses. Attention to the pages of illustrated histories, or photohistories, reveals both the increased presence of photographs, often used as indexes of historical places, and a new mode of interpreting older photographs as a haunting slice of lost time and a way of accessing emotional links to the past. Photographs became particularly haunting in the years after World War I, when nostalgia for the much-photographed prewar fin-de-siècle, or Paris 1900, made Parisians seem stranded in the present.

: British Public Administration

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Rigour ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Phoenix

This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled ‘dodo’, ‘phoenix’, and ‘chameleon’. The ‘dodo’ interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British Public Administration as in serious decline from early promise and former greatness. The ‘phoenix’ interpretation is a more optimistic perception of the subject as advancing in scientific rigour and conceptual sophistication over the century, leaving behind the outmoded styles of the past. A third view, the ‘chameleon’ interpretation, is a picture of lateral transformation, with the adoption of new intellectual colouring and markings to fit a new era.

After Nationalism? Urban History and East European History

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 774-778
Author(s):  
Chad Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Urban History ◽  
European History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Final Part ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The City

Urban history in our field has taken many different forms in the past few decades. Many such works, no doubt, have drawn great inspiration from scholars outside our area specialization. Many, however, have looked within our area specialization for inspiration, thus giving urban histories of our region several peculiar characteristics. The first part of this article discusses how urban historians have provided new perspectives on a topic long dear to Eastern Europeanist hearts—nationalism. Here the article looks at the ways in which Gary Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival has influenced how historians have studied nationalism and the city. The second part will briefly survey other forms of urban history that have predominated within the field, many of which recall the questions and approaches first found in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. The final part concludes with some thoughts about what the rise of urban history among Eastern Europeanists might mean for the future our field.

Liberal Reason and the Culture of the Sommerfrische

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Deborah R. Coen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
General Public ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

Fin-de-siècle Vienna continues to supply historians and the general public alike with a paradigm of the modernist subversion of rationality. From the birth of the unconscious, to the artistic expression of feral sexuality, to the surge of populist politics, Vienna 1900 stands as the turning point when a nineteenth-century ideal of rationality gave way to a twentieth-century fascination with subjectivity. In fact, we know little as yet about what rationality really meant to those to whom we attribute its undoing. Allan Janik writes that today the “‘big’ questions about Viennese culture” center on “just how ‘rational’ developments there have been,” and to answer these questions, Janik argues, we need research on the history of natural science in Austria. Indeed, as Steven Beller notes, the topic of science has been “strangely absent” from the animated discussions of fin-de-siècle Vienna over the past three decades.

Wavering in Delight

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Myrto Drizou
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Past ◽  
Models Of Teaching ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Sister Carrie

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.

scholarly journals Epilogue: Pan Narrans

2021 ◽  
pp. 247-258
Author(s):  
Emilie Taylor-Pirie
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this epilogue, Taylor-Pirie analyses the ‘heroic biography’ mode that still characterises popular histories of medicine as a legacy of the collision of science and empire at the fin de siècle. After considering the challenges inherent in writing contextual histories of science, and the human penchant for linear story-telling, she broadens her view to take into account political discourses surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Taylor-Pirie argues that stories of science and stories of empire shaped each other in ways that are contingent on this historical moment but that continue to inflect and occlude our self-knowledge. She contends that by paying attention to cultural encounters between medicine and the humanities in the past, we gain important insights into the relationship between science and society in the present.

scholarly journals Wilde Rewound: Time-Travelling with Oscar in Recent Author Fictions

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirby Joris
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Period Style ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Contemporary Author

In the early 1980s historical figures in general – and writers from the past in particular – entered a kind of Golden Age thanks to fiction. Through various forms of semi-biographical novels and other narratives, they have, from that time forward, been enjoying a pampered life in a new genre called “the author-as-character” (Franssen and Hoenselaars 1999) or “author fictions” (Savu 2009) that reanimate them or conjure them up in a present that constantly seeks to reassert its link with the past. This is particularly true of Oscar Wilde’s life, for his disparate and colourful personality has been time and again re-appropriated in recent fiction. This article focuses on three of these contemporary fictional depictions: an epistolary novel, an epistolary website and a fictional interview, all three dealing with a fictionalised Oscar Wilde conversing with a contemporary author who is also an interviewer in his or her own way and right. Because they are very close to each other in terms of narration (i.e. impersonation and pastiche) and subject, putting words in Wilde’s mouth as though they were his own, The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde, the website Dialogus, and Coffee with Oscar Wilde, represent three fascinating means of exploring how Oscar’s rebirth as a man and author actually takes place. Among the numerous fictional portraits of Oscar Wilde, I have thus chosen to pay particular attention to the depictions that are well anchored in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and which do not, therefore, display a narrative that would merely take place during the fin de siècle, with only period-style people in period costume. By contrast, the three portraits are literal time-travelling narratives that endeavour to bridge the gap between past, present and future.

GENDER IN MODERN EUROPE: CRIME AND VIRTUE Gender and crime in modern Europe. Edited by Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne. London: UCL Press, 1999. Pp. xv+288. ISBN 1-85728-746-0. £14.99. Breaking the codes: female criminality in fin-de-siècle Paris. By Ann-Louise Shapiro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. vi+265. ISBN 0-8047-2693-0. £10.95. Reign of virtue: mobilizing gender in Vichy France. By Miranda Pollard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xxi+285. ISBN 0-226-67350-2. £15.95.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-965
Author(s):  
KRISTEN STROMBERG CHILDERS
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Gender And Crime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Louis Xvi

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion in scholarship about issues of gender in the history of modern Europe. Historians have taken up topics from the fall of Louis XVI during the Revolution to the role of women in fascism to demonstrate the pivotal importance that matters of sexual difference have made in shaping politics, culture, and society in the last centuries. Scholars have realized that interpretations of class dynamics, work relations, collective action, and nations at war, for example, look considerably different and are far more complex when attention is paid to gender. Where the study of women in the past was once relegated to the backwaters, now courses on women's history and gender have taken a permanent place in most university curricula. Histories that include women have moved from ‘her-story’ (crudely, the history of individual women and their accomplishments) to analyses that use gender as an interpretative prism through which to view larger social and political transformations.The three books under review participate in this larger movement toward integrating the perspectives of gender into major issues of European history that have been researched by historians before, but from a standpoint that these authors find lacking. Margaret Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, as editors of a collection of essays on gender and crime, wish to correct some of the assumptions about women and crime that have been ignored by historians who focus mostly on more historically conspicuous male criminals. Ann-Louise Shapiro uses the trials of criminal women in late nineteenth-century Paris as ‘lightning rods’ that illuminate the social, political, and cultural conflicts of the fin-de-siècle.

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