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.”...

Reading Sideways

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Direct Relation ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas ◽  
Transverse Circulation

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 twentieth century. It tracks the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues 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. To track these practices it performs an interpretive method Seitler calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of, and see in a new light, their connections, challenges, and productive frictions.

Syphilitic General Paralysis

1893 ◽  
Vol 39 (165) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
M. J. Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Life Histories ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Short Life ◽  
General Paralysis ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vexed Question

At the present time, when our fin de siècle knowledge of “general paralysis” enables us to recognize under that generic term many types of the disorder, and when the relation between it and syphilis continues a rather vexed question, little apology is needed for introducing to notice the following cases. They illustrate unmistakably some of the instances in which syphilis is solely responsible for what. Is termed by Dr. Savage” A process of degeneration which ultimately produces the ruin we recognize as general paralysis.”∗ Whatever may be hereafter formulated from the present evolutionary crisis in the history of the disorder there can be but little doubt that syphilis will be one of its most intimate and important relations. The story of its methods is briefly sketched in the following two short life-histories—in one asserting itself in the offspring of its victims by right of impure heredity, in the other carrying death direct into the vital centres by the force of its malignant virus.

Vernon Lee: Slow Serialist and Journalist at the Fin de Siècle

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda K. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Periodical Publication

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.

“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.

Neuroaesthetics

2017 ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Ana Teresa Contier ◽  
Laila Torres
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Imaging Techniques ◽  
Neural Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
System Memory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic

The aesthetic experience has been discussed throughout the history of mankind by philosophers and art historians, becoming a universal part of human experience, which leads us to some great interdisciplinary questions. It has been the subject of study by neuroscientists and neuro-psychologists since the 2000s. This recent evolution of neurology studies in the field of art, is due to in vivo brain imaging techniques, especially functional neuroimaging. Furthermore, recent research has provided evidence of cognitive interaction during the perception of an artwork indicating that the perceptual experience of art is not merely a passive one. This article reviews important studies in neuroaesthectics of visual art that point out that the aesthetic experience is related to the distribution in the neural architecture, suggesting the involvement of sensory-motor areas, emotional centers, reward system, memory and language.

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.

Rinuccini the craftsman: A view of his L'Arianna

1999 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 75-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bujić
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If ◽  
The Craftsman

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

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