Fin de siècle poetry was often both anti-Victorian and anti-bourgeois in spite of the fact that its authors were frequently middle-class Victorians. While Victoria's reign did not end until 1901, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century poetry was moving away from those forms and styles that had come to be considered most quintessentially Victorian. By the time a sense of 'Victorian' values and aesthetics had been recognised and labelled as such, poets were able self-consciously to define their work in opposition to them, sometimes explicitly disavowing any affinity. It is for this reason that the last quarter of the century is often identified with the death of the Victorian aesthetic, and Decadence perceived as the wringing out of the last drops of a faded and over-played aesthetic. Yet, if this was the period in which Victorian poetry died, it was without a doubt the period in which many new poetries were born. In comparison with the lucrative novel, the economic marginality of poetry by this point in the century undoubtedly put it in a different relationship with its recent heritage. Much less likely to be loyal to tried and tested formulas, poetry begins to see itself as avant-garde. What we see in poetry of the period is not so much the limbo of 'transition' to modernist concerns, however, but what Richard Le Gallienne identified as a self-conscious desire for a new aesthetic and a new beginning.

The death of Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1892 can be seen as a symbolic marker of the fate of Victorian poetry. The well-attended funeral demonstrated that many ordinary people, whether or not they read poetry, felt the poet laureate represented something significant about national identity and pride. After Tennyson died, however, the post remained empty until the unexpected appointment of Alfred Austin in 1896.

Casting his practised eye over the English literary scene in 1884, Henry James was heartened to see signs of a new interest - new for England, at any rate - in the theory of the novel. 'Only a short time ago', James writes in 'The Art of Fiction', 'it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable': not, that is, an appropriate topic for debate or even moderately impassioned conversation. The novel in Victorian Britain had in James's view become a highly sophisticated art form, yet there was still among British readers 'a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and our only business with it could be to swallow it' (p. 44). Now such mindless ingestion was becoming less common. We have learned to increase our readerly pleasures, James maintains, precisely by stepping back to contemplate them critically. 'The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting' (p. 45) - especially at moments of creative ferment such as the 1880s, when theory and application alike were in productive turmoil. Casting aside outworn conventions, modern writers were in James's view developing new techniques for achieving the novel's only abiding goal: to 'represent life' through an ever-renewed engagement with 'reality' (p. 46). For James in 1884, the progress of literary realism was more or less coterminous with the advance of narrative fiction as a whole. Surveying the contemporary literary landscape, he found much to be encouraged by, not least in the new self-consciousness with which writers and readers of novels practised their respective tasks. 'The Art of Fiction' makes an urgent case for the 'fertilising' effect on the novel of 'discussion', of 'experiment', of 'curiosity', of 'variety of attempt', of a perpetual 'exchange of views and . . . comparison of standpoints'. As James reminds his readers, 'Art lives upon discussion' (pp. 44-5).

'Decadence, decadence, you are all decadent nowadays.' Thus bewails the hyper-conservative critic in the essay that Hubert Crackanthorpe published in the second volume of the journal The Yellow Book. Yet while Crackanthorpe was mocking the critics, decadence and aestheticism were a major source of contention from the moment they began flaunting their dissident passions before the British public in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1890s, many had had enough of the mix of aesthetic idealism, taunting self-display, uncommon sexuality and degeneracy that had become packaged as their defining characteristics. Max Nordau devoted an entire chapter of Degeneration (1892) to chastising both for encouraging pessimism, sexual aberrancy, mysticism and poor taste in clothing. While we might now find Nordau's extremism laughable, his contemporaries did not cast him aside as quickly. Similar arguments were being made even by artists and writers. George Du Maurier, for example, has the hero of his novel The Martian (1898) attack aesthetes as 'little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions'. Even contributors to the Aesthetic or Decadent movement - such as Richard le Gallienne, Vernon Lee and Walter Pater - voiced displeasure with some of their qualities. Meanwhile, late aestheticist and decadent works such as Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and Ada Leverson's short stories imply that the movements had in fact fallen into self-parody.

Did any period in literary history produce a higher concentration of masterpieces of fantastic fiction than the Victorian fin de siècle? Within a single three-year period appeared H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), and Henry James's The Turn of the Scre (1898). And these were just the most prominent peaks of a Himalayan range of fantastic fiction rising abruptly at the end of the nineteenth century. But before trying to account for this phenomenon, I should explain what I mean by fantastic fiction. Many of the generic labels used to classify popular fiction today were not yet in use in the nineteenth century. 'Science fiction', for example, did not exist in 1895 when H. G. Wells embarked on a series of novels that are now considered classics of the genre. It was not until the 1930s that the phrase began to be used to describe a number of works of fiction that seemed to share a family resemblance. The 'fantasy' and 'horror' sections of bookshops today carry labels recently developed by the publishing industry to exploit the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King, respectively. Popular genres are fluid entities, forming, blending and dissolving in response to changes in the literary marketplace. Here I will argue that one of the great literary achievements of the fin de siècle was a successful break with fictional realism, and so I require a transgeneric category embracing all the works that I will offer as evidence. In the fin de siècle itself, a novel was a realistic work; contemporary critics noted a revival of romance, namely fiction containing magical, supernatural and other non-realistic elements.

In seeking a mode in which to speak of the moment of the fin de siècle, one is immediately confronted by a history of conflicting narratives and trajectories. The term itself, of course, carries its own chronological presuppositions boldly before it, allowing barely the whisper of a continuity beyond the 'fin' to be heard. That lack of continuity is particularly emphasised in Oscar Wilde's employment of the term in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891):

This well-known moment occurs at Lady Narborough's house, in the midst of a particularly tedious evening, brought about by the sudden arrival of the hostess's daughter, who, 'to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her' (p. 201). The scene works by typically Wildean paradox and humour to ensnare readers into confronting their own prejudices and limitations, and to confound expectations. In particular, in a scene which immediately follows upon Dorian's murder of the painter Basil Hallward and the disposal of the body by Dorian's one time friend Alan Campbell, the expectation of endings, and the assumption of ennui, are confounded. Dorian's desire for a definitive ending, for sterility, a lack of continuity, his refutation of his life so far, the languor of his expressed desire, belie the extent of his visceral engagement with the sensational life which is the counterpart of his role as decadent icon. The extent of his languor testifies precisely to the extent of Dorian's awareness of his inextricable involvement with life, its continuities and complications.

The intense current interest in the fin de siècle has largely given us a view of the period as a perilously risqué epoch in attitudes about sex, sexuality and sexual identity. Many of the iconic figures of the period - the New Woman, the Bachelor-Dandy, the Decadent, the Femme Fatale - have assumed an enduring aura of risk, danger and transgression in erotic matters. Such fin de siècle 'myths' as Salome, Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reveal a cultural landscape given over to terrifying metaphors for sexuality. Degeneration, vampirism, syphilis, hysteria, these would seem to be the metaphors by which many late-Victorians thought of sexuality and the erotic self. Adding to this charged sexual atmosphere, the last decades of the century were dominated by controversies over declining birth rates and New Women, as well as sex scandals involving corruptible telegraph boys and upper-class Lotharios (the Cleveland Street case, in which a male brothel was exposed), and literary celebrities (the Wilde trials, in which a celebrated playwright was successfully prosecuted for sodomy). At the same time, we find at the end of the century such visionary enterprises as the Free Union and Birth Control movements, along with considerable utopian thought on sexuality in the writings of Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, all of whom detailed the deprivations of modern marriage and erotic longing with an explicitness, boldness and experimentalism that would have been impossible in a mid-Victorian context.

Like many other forms of artistic expression at the fin de siècle the drama faced in several directions at once, its distinction being that because drama is inherently dialogic it is relatively easy to express conflicting tendencies within the same work. Thus we find plays that actually incorporate the complexities of change within their formal structure. And this phenomenon goes back to preceding decades when a series of assaults on the status quo had produced strange hybrids.

The theatre of the mid-nineteenth century, though by no means to be dismissed, had tended towards the comforting and the established: plays that celebrated the culture socially and domestically, together with productions of Shakespeare that were coloured with patriotic motifs and settings that consolidated the figure of Shakespeare, the national bard, as if he could have seen the British Empire coming. As elsewhere in Europe, the conventions of the 'well-made play', usually based on French models with their fixed structures, predictable climaxes and established themes, were pervasive.

Change, when it came, was belated and partial, with Ibsen largely responsible. In his middle and later periods Ibsen inaugurated a theatrical debate into the great issues of the day: the claims of women, the call for leadership, the function of religion, the nature of creativity and, above all, the need to engage with the future. The story of the fight to get his plays staged in England has been told many times. Between 1889 and 1891 the following plays were staged: A Doll's House (1889, with an earlier private reading in 1886 organised by Eleanor Marx), Ghosts (1891), Hedda Gabler (1891) and The Lady from the Sea (1891). The response to these productions was extraordinary, ranging from outright disgust (such as Clement Scott's likening 'the auditorium [to] a hospital-ward or dissecting room' in the Daily Telegraph and so on) to immediate conversion to a new if sometimes puzzling aesthetic.

When the Westminster Gazette began publication in January 1893 as a radical-liberal evening paper it turned to the essayist and novelist, Grant Allen, to provide a regular column of social commentary. The range of issues on which this notably prolific, socialist polemicist campaigned included Home Rule for Ireland, the uselessness of the aristocracy, the tyranny of monopolies, the burden on women of 'worn out moralities', the importance of internationalism; his affiliations lay with the Fabian Society, the Land Nationalisation Society, the Legitimation League and the Free Press Defence Committee. Allen's enthusiasms are instructive partly because they suggest something of the extent to which the boundaries separating radical-liberal or New Liberal positions, and those subsequently denoted as socialist, had become blurred by the 1890s. In the last year of his life, 1899, and in common with many, although by no means all, socialists, Allen campaigned against the Boer War (1899-1902); yet it was a New Liberal thinker, J. A. Hobson, who spearheaded pro-Boer support and who produced the most eloquent critique of imperialism of its day.

But beneath the confusing, shifting surface at the fin de siècle, there were detectable patterns in the orientation of radical ideas. Some had their origins in the evolution in social thought associated with the assimilation of the ideas of Comte. His positivism offered a substantial legacy to British intellectuals who sought a systematic means of analysing society and developing a rational future founded on a secular, scientific basis. From such application of scientific knowledge to the problems of society would come a positive philosophy of life which for its adherents 'would be the salvation of mankind'.

'The real revolution in British publishing in the reign of Queen Victoria was that it became a fully fledged industry, turning over millions of pounds, conducting its affairs in a businesslike manner, and dealing fairly with the different interest groups within it and around it.' So wrote John Feather in 1988, using a term ('industry') that the twentieth century came to accept as a seemingly uncontroversial and unproblematic one to describe the sphere from which texts issue and through which they circulate. At the fin de siècle, however, no one could have called publishing an 'industry' so breezily, without comment. The word still bore a wealth of associations and evoked a wide range of both negative and positive feelings that made its usage a vexed matter. It was a label fraught with political meaning, and some members of the late-Victorian world of books and periodicals accepted it gladly, even as others rejected it as antithetical to their beliefs and to the ways in which they worked or wished to work. With so many of the important ideological conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century focused on labour, the notion of publishing as occupying the status of an industry inserted itself squarely amidst these discussions, and was much debated. The image of machinery, moreover, on which this idea relied - whether of factory machines or of the human brain and hands as potential sources of mechanised and standardised labour - had enormous resonance among publishers, printers, editors and authors alike.

One response, as modelled by the Aesthetes of the 1880s and 1890s, was to deny outright that Art (always with a capital 'A') had anything to do with the collective undertakings and division of labour demanded by industrial practices; neither did it have any relationship to industriousness. The making of literature was, the Aesthetes insisted, solitary, private, impossible to bind to a schedule, and equally impossible to document.

At the conclusion of Matthew Phipps Shiel's 1898 work The Yellow Danger - an adventure in which protagonist John Hardy stymies an invasion of Europe by Asian 'hordes' headed by Dr Yen How, a 'fiendish' composite of East and West - the novel's narrator steps back to assess his country's position at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrasting the evil cosmopolitanism of the Far Eastern mastermind with the provincialism of his British heroes, Shiel writes 'England, no doubt, will, in truth, absorb the world: the Loadstone [sic] is within us. But we must change. If the world is to become English, the English must first become worldly.' This warning and prophecy reiterates the novel's opening, in which Victorian Britain's imperial expansion is seen as concomitant with her potentially disastrous retraction from Europe: 'Europe had receded from Britain, and Britain, in her pride, had drawn back from Europe. From the curl of the moustache, to the colour and cut of the evening-dress, to the manner in which women held up their skirts, there was similarity between French and German, between German and Russian and Austrian, and dissimilarity between all these and English' (p. 2).

From its title to its conclusion, The Yellow Danger thus dramatises the double helix of fin de siècle representations of Empire: on the one hand, the promise of continued expansion, new 'spheres of influence', and the success of the 'civilising mission' and, on the other, the fear of collapse, degeneration and reverse colonisation that Shiel's narrative works so well to conjure up and then dispel.

In the first act of The New Woman, Sidney Grundy's satirical play from 1894, the audience is presented with a dispute between two contrasting but utterly characteristic New Woman figures from the fin de siècle, Enid Bethune and Victoria Vivash:

Enid Bethune's disapproval of male sexuality and her desire for sexual chastity in both women and men firmly ally her with a social purity feminism that was highly influential in the late nineteenth century. Social purity feminists campaigned against prostitution and decadent male sexuality, and had amongst their number the leading New Woman novelist, Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall, 1854-1943). Grundy's Victoria Vivash, by contrast, demands sexual parity between women and men, and wishes women to enjoy the same sexual freedoms as men. In the fictional field such a stance was supported by the popular writer of New Woman short stories, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945). Both positions - as evidenced by the success of Sidney Grundy's theatrical spoof on the New Woman - provoked considerable controversy in the late-Victorian cultural sphere.

Early on in the 1984 book-length dialogue between astrophysicist Tullio Regge and concentration-camp survivor and chemist Primo Levi, Regge mentions his interest in comparing the Hebrew and Italian versions of the Bible. Levi is immediately struck: 'is your passion born from a linguistic, philological interest, or from something else?' (Conversations, p. 3). This opening talk is, surprisingly, not about science, which was the intended topic of their dialogue, nor even about Levi's experiences in Auschwitz-Monowitz, but rather about problems of translation, between Hebrew, Greek and Italian, and interpretation of the Bible, from Dante to the Talmud. Levi's perceptive observations about the intricacies of Bible translation and interpretation (a topic that lies at the core and historical origin of translation studies) reminds us that translation was not only a trade he practised, but also a subject he studied and thought about in some depth, part of a large, intense interest in language and language systems in general terms. The conversation with Regge continually navigates between linguistics, etymology and translation (among other topics) and this pattern can be observed throughout his many interviews as well as his own written work.

While Levi's career as a scientist and writer and his experience as a writersurvivor have been well documented, his rich and varied career as a translator has remained largely unknown and unanalysed. Levi translated parts of a four-volume chemistry textbook in the 1950s, works of anthropology by Mary Douglas and Claude Léi-Strauss, Holocaust narratives, poetry by Heine and Rudyard Kipling and several diverse fragments of novels, works of history and science for his own anthology, The Search for Roots (La ricerca delle radici, 1981).

Levi's 'science-fiction' or 'science-fantasy' stories make for fascinating and often unsettling reading. They are stories that slip in and out of conventional genre categories, oscillating between narrating what appears to be purely fictional, and what feels uncannily close to our lived experience. Levi moves from myth and fable to satire and irony; at times he focuses on alternative histories, at others on dystopic futures, in a way that recalls resonantly the range of the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Subjects tackled include: robots that compose poetry; duplicator machines; virtual reality devices; cryogenics; test-tube babies; and a sinister, self-generating telephone network. Most of Levi's stories that fall into this rather blurry category are collected in two volumes: Storie naturali ('Natural Histories', 1966), and Vizio di forma ('Formal Defect', 1971).

Levi first began writing stories of this kind relatively early on in his writing career; the first drafts of 'The Mnemogogues' ('I mnemagoghi'), 'The Sixth Day' ('Il sesto giorno') and 'The Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge: A Winter's Tale' ('La bella addormentata nel frigo') (all from 'Natural Histories', all in The Sixth Day), date from 1946, 1946-7 and 1952 respectively. Many stories first appeared in newspapers such as Il mondo and Il giorno and were reworked for republication in the later collections. They thus run contemporaneous with his testimonial work, and, as will be seen below, act as extensions of Levi's writing about the Lager. This chapter, as well as exploring such links, examines the ways in which Levi uses fiction as a vehicle to comment on and think through contemporary and future scientific developments. In this sense the stories are themselves forms of experimental writing. In particular, it looks at his problematization of scientific 'progress' as inevitably beneficial for human life, and explores themoral and ethical concerns that he feels are raised by such developments.

Some readers may feel a sense of unease at treating Primo Levi's work (and particularly his writings about the camps) as literary objects, rather than texts crucial for their ethical, political and historical value. But, as Cesare Segre has argued, 'ethical commitment' is 'among the most important parameters for evaluating a work of art': in both this and the more strictly literary sense, Levi is 'one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century'. Similarly, Daniele Del Giudice notes, in his introduction to Levi's works, that Levi's personal experience of the concentration camp and his ethical commitment to the truth in no way diminish the nature of his account as 'narrative invention' or 'representation' (OI, xiii). His testimonial writing is 'the totally “experimental” and literally unprecedented enactment of a narrative, which was the only way that post-Auschwitz allowed Auschwitz to be recounted' (OI, xxx-xxxi, our translations). It is in this context that this chapter hopes to contribute to a discussion of the role of language in Levi's work. Its emphasis is less on precise textual analysis and more on his own views on language and style and engagement with language and languages, which relate very closely to the core concerns of his writing.

Levi was a writer of a very particular and unusual kind. His relationship to language and to literary language was driven by an intense interest in and enthusiasm for the functioning of different languages and sign systems. His literariness, his style, grew out of what we might call a 'linguistician's mindset'. To understand this mindset and this style better, the following discussion will look in turn at his engagement with idioms beyond Italy, with dialects and varieties of his native language, his style, and their links to the centrality of communication in his testimonial work.