Fin de siècle: the meaning of the twentieth century

1996 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-359
Author(s):  
Peter Lawler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-229
Author(s):  
Soledad Quereilhac
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Legitimation ◽  
Scientific Discourses ◽  
Growth Of Science

This chapter analyzes the uses and appropriations of scientific discourse in Argentine magazines from the fin de siècle: a period in which literary modernism coincided with the development of spiritualisms that aspired to the status of science (or “occult sciences”) like Spiritism and Theosophy. The aim is to examine concrete examples that relativize the sharp division between science, art, and spiritualism in the culture of this period. The main sources explored are La Quincena. Revista de letras (1893–1899), Philadelphia (1898–1902), La Verdad (1905–1911), and Constancia (1890–1905). In addition, the chapter focuses on how the astonishing growth of science in Argentina, as well as the social legitimation of scientific discourses, influenced other fields, giving shape to new literary expressions, beliefs, and utopian projections that synthesized the material and the spiritual.

Technologies of Detection

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Modern Technologies

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective. Mapping the literary trope of the New Woman detective, and the part played by modern technologies in these narratives, the chapter considers the nature of forensic evidence and the gendered use of technologies in producing this knowledge. Reading M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), the chapter considers New Woman detective fiction as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the 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.

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.

Inconclusions

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-227
Author(s):  
Koenraad Claes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Victorian Age

This chapter provides a summary of the argument of the book and of the history developed therein of the little magazine genre in Britain from 1850 (the Germ) to 1901 (the folding of the Page). A glance ahead at the coming Edwardian interlude and the later modernist period indicates that early-twentieth-century titles such as Rhythm (1911–13), BLAST (1914–15) and the Little Review (1914–29) were faced by the same challenges as their Victorian predecessors. As is shown, some of the most famous modernist detractors of the Victorian age were actually aware that their journals were part of the legacy of the Fin-de-Siècle periodicals treated in this book, even though they often disowned this connection.

Victorian Drydown and Sillage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter considers the reception of the Victorian perfumed legacy by examining two contrasting early twentieth-century literary responses to perfume and decadence by Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. Woolf had little personal contact with the culture of decadence, her diary displaying her puritanism and distrust of perfume. Later in life her novel Flush (1933) allows her a rapprochement with Victorian literature and smell, while her memoirs show her becoming more accommodating of her sensory self. In contrast, Mackenzie had a relaxed attitude towards Victorian decadence, perfume, and smell, and enjoyed the literature of the fin de siècle. This liberal response is expressed in his autobiography, various essays, and his two most important early novels Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14), where his protagonists reveal his skill as an ‘aromancer’, adept at using scented memories and impressions to underscore the key moments and experiences in an individual’s life.

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