scholarly journals ‘Dress sense of a queen’: Cecil Beaton’s queering of Britain’s royal past

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Dominic Janes
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Cross Dressing

The origins of camp can be traced by exploring the ways in which the past was queered during the inter-war period. Cecil Beaton was establishing himself as one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. He and many of his friends were fascinated by the styles of the period before 1914. That interest extended to cross-dressing and the construction of photographic collages that ironically juxtaposed the fashions of the past and the present. The effect of this was to make the dresses and aristocratic social mores of the fin de siècle appear amusingly excessive. In the process the image of royalty was reinvented through travesty and social life in Britain was invested with queer opportunity.

Kelsen’s Milieu

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-65
Author(s):  
Robert Schuett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Foreign Intelligence

Who shaped the early Kelsen’s style of thinking under the Kaiser? What were the intellectual circles in which he moved in fin-de-siècle Vienna and the interwar period before he left Austria for Cologne, Geneva, Prague, and the United States? The chapter explores ‘the other Kelsen’ by revisiting his formative years, as well as his work in the lecture halls of university and his high-profile roles in the War Ministry, Karl Renner’s state chancellery, and American foreign intelligence after escaping the fascist Continent. A reluctant jurist, Kelsen had a passion for philosophy and literature, and from Freud and the economists he learned that individual and social life was all about drives and desires, instincts and interests. Where Kelsen was, there was no land of utopia.

TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPEAN SOCIETY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RADICAL INTELLECTUALS IN THE PERIOD OF FIN-DE-SIECLE (1890-1914)

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
M.V. Chernyshev
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
European Society ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Gabriele D'annunzio ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The 19Th Century

Fin-de-siècle is a French definition for “end of the age”, though also implying an era of changes in different spheres of social life within European society between 1890 and 1914. At the turn of the 20th century we can observe the phenomenon of formation of the new type of modernist political ideology “beyond Left and Right” which tended to adopt some sort of cultural revolt against decadent bourgeois society and associate it with new forms of political actions. Famous writers of the Fin-de-siècle Gabriele D’Annunzio and Maurice Barrès embodied in their writings this tendency. This essay argues that despite their claimed break with the tradition of the 19th century and search for individual liberation, the representatives of the new intellectual tradition put into practice some of the ideas that later were associated with European totalitarian ideologies of fascism and national socialism. This study attempts to describe development of views of the two writers on the national societies taking into consideration a certain number of dynamic tensions within the period of European fin-de-siècle: first of all, between the tendencies of Decadence which were evident in the last quarter of the 19th century and the desire for spiritual renewal, between the cult of personal perfection and the collective myth of political nationalism.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document