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.

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Drug Induced ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

French Folk Songs and the Invention of History

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindhumathi Revuluri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
History Writing ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.

scholarly journals Novák's Lucerna and the Historiographical Problem of "Czech Modernism"

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-112
Author(s):  
Brian Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Czech Music ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Stylistic Influences ◽  
The Aesthetic

The opera Lucerna (premièred 1923) by the Czech composer Vitězslav Novák demonstrates the problematic position of Czech music in the historiography of the early twentieth century, since neither "avant-garde" nor "antimodernist" suffice for it as stylistic labels. A leader of Czech modernism during the fin de siècle, Novák's music embodies the aesthetic crisis his generation faced after 1918. Lucerna's score reveals a complex negotiation of multiple stylistic influences, including impressionism, folklore, and Strauss, paralleling the Czech community's hesitant acceptance of international modernism in the early interwar period. The opera's lack-lustre finale echoes the contemporaneous return to Czech traditional values, using Smetana as an anachronistic model for modernist opera.

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.

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