Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Florence

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Billiani ◽  
Stefano Evangelista
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda K. Hughes

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.


Author(s):  
Nick Freeman

This article examines the uses of realism in fin-de-siècle ghost stories by Vernon Lee, Ella D’Arcy, Rudyard Kipling, and Gertrude Atherton, It argues that forms of realist practice were central to the sophistication of these stories, and draws connections between their use in supernatural fiction and the work of modernists such as Joseph Conrad. Examining works from the late 1880s to 1905, it maintains that the dismissal of realism by modernists such as Woolf underestimated its importance and its versatility, and that the ghost story’s importance as a vehicle for literary experiment is insufficiently acknowledged.


Author(s):  
Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin ◽  
Angus Mitchell

Abstract Archival evidence of the connection between Alice Stopford Green (1847–1929) and Vernon Lee (1856–1935) is restricted to a handful of letters and a few scattered references in ancillary documents. Extant correspondence provides a glimpse into the conversation and concerns of these two important European intellectuals, demonstrating their nascent interest in questions of social justice. Using network theory as a lens, this essay traces the contours of this connection, initiated during a formative period for both in the fertile context of the salons and dining rooms of London in the 1880s. This connection demonstrates the importance of social networks for women writers, artists, intellectuals and activists during the fin de siècle. By exploring the limited archival remnants of this friendship, this study highlights the Irish and European dimensions of Victorian metropolitan culture. It was because of salon culture that women with strikingly different backgrounds and sensibilities could connect and explore ideas of mutual concern, with reverberations for their political positioning and activism in subsequent decades.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

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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