scholarly journals Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fin-de-Siècle Vampire “Olalla” (1885) as ‘Aesthetic Fantastic’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelo Riccioni
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Strange Story ◽  
Derivative Work ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Different Sources

“Olalla” (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson has usually been neglected by critics interested in late-Victorian culture. Preceding of just a few weeks the publication of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), this novella has been judged as a derivative work, a story whose interest lies in its different sources, ranging from Edward Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story to E.A. Poe’s tales. My analysis aims to prove that in writing this work, Stevenson is probably drawing inspiration from the imagery exploited by some members of the Aesthetic Movement, among them Walter Pater and Edward Burne-Jones.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Decadence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art For Art's Sake

Decadence was a word used to refer, often disparagingly, to late-19th-century European writers and artists whose credo of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ (Dictionary of Art Historians) went hand in hand with an open disdain for morality and for the values of their own societies. Often associated with modern French literature and its influence, decadent tendencies were observed in many different countries. In England, its main representatives were Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and various figures who were inspired by French examples and by the aestheticism of Walter Pater (1839–1894). Its main features were a cult of beauty, refinement and artificiality; a fascination for the paradoxical, the bizarre, the exotic and the perverse; and an iconoclastic attitude towards dominant values. While manifestations of decadence did earn a place in fin-de-siècle London culture, the phenomenon did not survive the spectacular fall of Oscar Wilde in 1895, but some of its ideas and attitudes point forward to modernism.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

The Introduction first considers the etymological and historical meanings of decadence. Different interpretations of the word “decadence” point to historical decline, social decay, and aesthetic inferiority. Decadence today may be best understood as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity, which first arose in nineteenth-century France and is best expressed by the author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Decadence then “travelled” to London, where Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) became the preeminent decadent writer. Other metropolitan centers that made up part of the urban geography of decadence during the fifty-year period (1880–1930) of decadence’s peak were fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin.

scholarly journals The Aesthetic Interior as Incubator of Health and Well-Being

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Richard W. Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Interior Design ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Domestic Interiors ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Dress Reform

ABSTRACTDomestic interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement have often been interpreted in terms of the ideas of aesthetic autonomy associated with Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans. This essay takes a different tack by analysing the aesthetic interior in light of concerns with health reform. It focuses on the writings and designs of architect E.W. Godwin (1833–86) who pursued interior design as part of an effort to foster a healthy life, one that consisted of hygiene, relief from urban stress, and an enlargement of the aesthetic responsiveness of his clients. He conceived of spare and calm interiors that were healthful alternatives to dust-infested Victorian clutter while concomitantly offering psychological respite from the ‘high-pressure, nervous times’ endemic to metropolitan life. This goal accords with Godwin's related interest in dress reform, a preoccupation that led to his participation in the Health Exhibition of 1884. By unpacking Godwin's specific contribution to the sanitary discussions that prevailed in Victorian Britain, I align the aesthetic interior with the central imperative of sanitary reform: promoting health through ameliorating Britain's urban environment.

scholarly journals Culture and corruption in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Em Tese ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Paulo Augusto de Melo Wagatsuma
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Dorian Gray ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article analyses the supposed moral decadence in Oscar Wilde's novel<br />based on the aesthetic trends of his time as well as his writings on the same<br />topic and politics. It is argued that behind the horror tale of Dorian Gray's<br />life lies a veiled critique to fin-de-siècle Victorian society.

Top Notes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Aggressive Reaction ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siècle

After a brief discussion of Eugene Rimmel and Septimus Piesse, two major manufacturers and promoters of Victorian perfume, this chapter provides an overview of fragrance use for the Victorians, and explores attitudes towards perfume in early and mid-Victorian fiction with special reference to the figure of the scented dandy. The second part of this chapter shows how Victorian poetry reflects the influential perfumed legacy of Romanticism and, in particular, Shelley, a key precursor for many aesthetic and decadent writers, with an illustrative reading of Edmund Gosse’s ‘Perfume’, a sonnet saturated with echoes from both Shelley and Keats. After a brief discussion of the ‘hothouse’ atmosphere of aestheticism, decadence, and the fin de siècle, the chapter concludes with reference to the aggressive reaction of male modernists, and in particular, T. S. Eliot, to a Romantic and Victorian culture seen as decadent, feminine, and perfumed.

Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laleen Jayamanne
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Aesthetic

Raul Ruiz’s film on Klimt and Gustav Klimt’s own work are examined in terms of a cluster of related ideas; namely allegory, fragmentation, and ornamentation. Modern allegory, whether cinematic or painterly, is shown to have powers of fragmenting organic forms. Similarly, modern ornamentation is elaborated as a power to dematerialize solid forms reaching towards the infinitesimal in perception. Through these devices of allegorical ornamentation, the Ruizean cinematic image and sound are imbued with polysemia and corresponding pathic sates of intensity. The role of the cinematic closeup in facilitating these processes of fragmentation is also examined. The multi-ethnic polity of fin-de-siècle Vienna on the brink of its dissolution is perceived through the aesthetic optic of a delirious Klimt on his deathbed.

The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

As the Irish Revival took shape and the Home Rule debate dominated UK politics, what was happening in Scotland? This book reveals distinct but comparable concerns with cultural defence and revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, evident in the work of a number of writers and artists including Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick Geddes, Fiona Macleod, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Mona Caird, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Duncan and various contributors to The Evergreen. Situating Scottish literature and art alongside international developments in culture, especially the rise of decadence, symbolism and Celticism, the book demonstrates the ways in which dissident fin-de-siècle styles and ideas supported and defined the Scottish Revival.

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