Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T09:11:41.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THE FIN DE SIECLE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Jock Macleod
Affiliation:
Griffith University

Extract

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE 1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which the fin de siècle was constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out of avant garde from bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

Type
REVIEW ESSAYS
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson Amanda. 2001. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP
Anderson Amanda. “Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities.” Victorian Studies 47. 2 (Winter 2005): 195203.
Attridge Steve. 2003. Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Bailkin Jordanna. 2004. The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Beckson Karl. 1992. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. New York: Norton
Dowling Linda. 1986. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton UP
Gagnier Regenia. 1986. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford: Stanford UP
Gagnier Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Goodlad Lauren. 2003. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP
Greenslade William, and Terence Rodgers, eds. 2005. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Aldershot: Ashgate
Hobson J. A.The Task of Realism.” English Review 3 (Sept. 1909): 32434.
Joyce Patrick. 2003. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso
Ledger Sally, & Scott McCracken, eds. 1995. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Ledger Sally, & Roger Luckhurst, eds. 2000. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900. Oxford: Oxford UP
Nevinson Henry. 1923. Changes and Chances. London: Nisbet
Shiach Morag. 2004. Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 18901930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Small Ian. 1991. Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: CP
Thomas David Wayne. 2004. Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic. Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia P
Walkowitz Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago