Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine M. Guy
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Distinct Period

This chapter provides an overview of critical histories of the fin de siècle outlining some of the key concepts associated with defining this period in literary history. It explores the relationship between global, national and regional understandings of the fin de siècle, and poses questions about the utility of the term ‘fin de siècle’ as marking out a distinct period in literary history. The Introduction also provides brief summaries of each of the following chapters in the volume.

Tactile Vision and Enworlded Being

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Phenomenal Field ◽  
The Relationship

Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the ‘Mutoscope’. The three-dimensionality, tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. Finally, the relationship between the self and the other is considered, through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.

Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between performance culture in two regional cities in the British Midlands—Nottingham and Birmingham—as compared to that in the metropolis, London. It compares reactions to plays by Ibsen and Pinero in these locales, providing evidence to suggest that regional audiences were knowledgeable about London culture, and that they were less shocked by avant-garde theatre than might be assumed.

‘In that Egyptian den’: situating The Beetle within the fin-de-siècle fiction of Gothic Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ailise Bulfin
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Phenomenon

This chapter analyses the relationship between Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and colonial politics, placing The Beetle within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns. The chapter provides a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. The chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

scholarly journals Portugal's First Queer Novel: Rediscovering Visconde de Vila-Moura's Nova Safo (1912)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Klobucka
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Marginal Status

This study seeks to recover the novel Nova Safo (1912) by Visconde de Vila-Moura from the marginal status to which it has been consigned in Portuguese literary history by arguing for its momentous cultural relevance as Portugal’s first queer novel. Given the extremely limited number and scope of existing critical approaches to the text, my reading is oriented by a reparative strategy that aims, first and foremost, to remedy its precarious status as an archival object. I describe the novel's inchoate and cluttered collection of references, images, and storylines as a countercultural scrapbook of queer feeling, ruled by an antiquarian sensibility, whose structures of cohesion belong less to the realm of formal aesthetics than to the sphere of homophilic affective epistemology. Further, I chart Nova Safo's intersecting gestures of transitive embodiment—transnational, transgender, and transracial—by discussing the novel’s mournful evocation of three recently departed icons of fin-de-siècle literary culture: Oscar Wilde, Renée Vivien, and João da Cruz e Sousa.

Gothic Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.

Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of Dracula identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.

‘JESUS THE SANS-CULOTTE’: MARXISM AND RELIGION DURING THE FRENCH FIN DE SIÈCLE

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 705-727 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT STUART
Keyword(s):  
Circuit Breaker ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
World Views ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
Religious Polemic ◽  
The Relationship

Most historians have assumed a fundamental antagonism between Marxism and theism. In practice, the relationship between the two world-views has been far more complex than simple hostility – a complexity admirably illustrated by the experience of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) between 1882 and 1905. While the Marxists of the POF developed a vicious socialist anti-clericalism that made its own original contribution to France's long tradition of anti-religious polemic, they none the less experimented with a rudimentary Christian socialism designed to attract the proletarian faithful, and also developed an agnostic programme of religious indifference which sought to insert the circuit-breaker of class conflict into the highly charged link between militant secularism and Catholic clericalism. This article examines the intricate and, in the end, incoherent, pattern of engagement between Marxist socialism and French religion during the fin de siècle, and suggests that this incoherence contributed to the eventual frustration of the Parti Ouvrier's revolutionary purpose.

scholarly journals Blicke von der Veranda: Luxustourismus in den Alpen der Jahrhundertwende

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 101-132
Author(s):  
Michael Wedekind
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
The Relationship

Grand hotels had first been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyses the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps. The success of mountain grand hotels was tied to increasing industrialization and a new understanding of travel. Their thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was an expression of a business as much as of social philosophy. Throughout the fin-de-siècle, mountains served as a backdrop for the narrative of the époque’s scientific and technical progress and became subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Mountain grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure, but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of spaces set away for tourism. Natural space had widely been turned into social space for visual and leisurely consumption, raising questions of authority, priority, appropriation, and imposition. By mapping the perception of mountains along the history of mountain grand hotels, this essay studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain tourism at the fin-de-siècle. It examines how the history of the mountain grand hotel conflates with the forces of colonialism, and capitalism and showcases how these spaces reflect the socio-economic transformations that ultimately paved the way for mountain mass tourism.

scholarly journals Neither Animal nor Human: An Ecogothic reading of the Monstrous Hybrid in Dracula, The Beetle and The Snake Lady

2020 ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Aurora Murga Aroca
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Relationship

This article analyses the relationship between humans and animals, and more importantly between humans and their animality. Concretely, this project proposes an ecocritical reading of fin de siècle gothic fiction, as it provides insight on the ideological foundation of humanity’s anthropocentric relation towards the environment. Through the analysis of the gothic hybrid monster, it is possible to grasp society’s interpretation and assimilation of Darwin’s revolutionary discoveries. However, not all gothic writers assimilated the apparent artificiality of humanity’s superiority in the same way. Thus, I hereby argue that rejection and fear is not the only response to the monstrous hybrid in fin de siècle gothic fiction. On the contrary, there are also critical voices who understood this new Darwinian human-hybrid identity as an opportunity to renew human relations towards nature. Therefore, I analyse the constructions of and reactions to the hybrid monster in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle against Vernon Lee’s Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady. By doing so, I aim at revealing and ultimately challenging the main dualism that sustains the hierarchical organization of the species: the privileging of culture over nature and reason over animality. The gothic genre is indeed characterised by the blurring of boundaries. Consequently, it reveals the human as irrational, the monster as natural and culture as repression, suggesting the need for the reconstruction of human identity and its place in the world.

scholarly journals Beyond the Boundaries of Realism Monstrous Islands and Literary Hybrids at the Fin de Siècle in Conan Doyle’s, R. L. Stevenson’s and H. G. Wells’s Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Gay
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
The Way

This article explores the way in which at the fin de siècle, Doyle, Stevenson and Wells chose to set their works on marginal islands in order to spatially escape not only from the bleak reality of the modern world, but also from the constraints of realism, and to reconnect with more imaginative forms of writing. It thus aims to shed new light on the relationship between geographical space and literary aesthetics, and to demonstrate that the island space is especially conducive to generic excursions out of realism and towards the fantastic, the marvellous and even the monstrous, leading to the creation of eminently hybrid literary texts.

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