This chapter considers the role of the essay in debates over the ‘rise of English’ in the nineteenth century. It firstly explores the crossover between academia and publishing, focusing on David Masson and George Saintsbury, whose well-regarded literary essays led to professorial appointments at London and Edinburgh. It then considers how University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins turned to periodical essays to garner support for the introduction of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. Collins’s diatribes argued that the literary essay itself was at risk of extinction if journalists and critics continued to be deprived of professional training. Finally, this chapter considers the inclusion of essayists on English literature syllabuses during the fin de siècle. Figures such as Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt, and John Dryden, along with later writers including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Charles Lamb were prominently featured, suggesting that essayists were regarded as the sine qua non of literary study at that time.

The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

Originally written in Malayalam, Indian writer O. Chandumenon’s novel, Indulekha (1889–90) was translated into English within a year of its publication and reprinted every year for almost a century. This chapter focuses on Indulekha’s engagement with a matrilineal household, typical of the Nair community in late nineteenth-century Malabar. In doing so, the chapter is attentive to the novel’s choice of genre. By taking up matriliny through the lens of realism, the novel not only departs from a fairly common nineteenth-century practice of depicting matriliny through romance but also remaps realism, extending its scope and valence amidst the social, sexual, and political shifts marking the fin de siècle, transimperially conceived.

In this introduction to Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, the editors, Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney, situate the contents of the collection in relationship to the larger objectives of the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series, which aims to move beyond existing preconceptions of individual decades within the nineteenth century by producing new characterizations enabled by recent critical methodologies. This volume highlights in particular the role that work attending to the transnational, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and new approaches to gender and sexuality might play in reshaping our understanding of a period often referred to as “the Naughty Nineties.” This work, the editors argue, enhances our understanding of the nineteenth century’s closing years in their full complexity, dynamism, and intellectual ferment and makes a case for the relevance of perspectives from the 1890s regarding issues that still preoccupy us today.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

Though Chekhov died just before the full-blown fin-de-siècle mood burst forth in Russia around the time of the first revolution in 1905, Mark Steinberg locates Chekhov within a first-wave fin de siècle following the regicide of Alexander II, and depicts Chekhov’s own searching agnostic temperament as symptomatic of this cultural moment, with its heightened anxieties concerning the ailments of modernity and its renewed interest in the concept of personality (or lichnost’) as an antidote.

This chapter focuses initially on the impact of late nineteenth-century medical theory (hysteria, hypnotism, etc.) on the novel and the burgeoning of medically-inflected fiction. Post-hypnotic suggestion led to stories of crime and sexual manipulation and introduced the figure of the unscrupulous doctor/hypnotist, usually bested by a good-hearted physician expert in hypnotism techniques. Ambient medical research on mind-control and dual identity influenced Maupassant’s fiction, most notably in his story ‘Le Horla’. Substantial tales (‘Boule de suif’, ‘La Maison Tellier’) foreshadow and feed the drama, irony and humour of Maupassant’s novels. Three of these are studied here: the raucous, ferociously ironic Bel-Ami, the family drama of illegitimacy and identity, Pierre et Jean, and a story of the despondency of ageing and lost love, Fort comme la mort. The chapter closes with a discussion of the novels of Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), seen increasingly as an important figure of France’s decadent period. Her early novels Monsieur Vénus and La Marquise de Sade played daringly with the notion of gender reversals and sadism, exercised against men; such themes suggest today an underlying feminist persuasion, an affiliation she denied. Later novels, many-textured such as La Tour d’amour, or La Jongleuse, a male/female confrontation on seduction and love, reveal the broadening of the novelist’s talent.

This chapter asks whether the “planetary,” a term that has gained currency in literary criticism since the 1990s, is a manageable framework through which to study modernism. Current iterations of the “planetary” signal crises in our contemporary shared human environment, while also marking a transformation in our disciplines. Addressing this bind, Blanco considers a number of different uses and versions of “planetarity,” from Gayatri Spivak’s and Enrique Dussel’s to Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent provocations within the new modernist studies. While thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of framing a center-less modernism, Blanco also asks what happens when rupture is not thought of as the principal operating principle through which to think modernism. Framing these questions around the experiences of Spanish American modernistas in fin-de-siècle Paris (especially Nicaraguan Rubén Darío and Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo), Blanco ask whether a privileging of a planetary framework effectively undoes a workable conceptualization of modernism.

This chapter deals with Munich and Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), two central places in the life of Richard Strauss. It focuses not only on the phases during which he lived and worked there, but also the significance of both cities in terms of Strauss today. Munich and Garmisch changed considerably over Strauss's lifetime, which spanned from the reign of Ludwig II and influence of Richard Wagner in Munich to the destruction of World War II and the early post-war period, offers a complex, changeful picture. The chapter focuses on the interpenetration of cultural, social, political, and artistic structures and Strauss's interaction with their representatives. By locating the composer and conductor in different milieus, life and work are to become graspable as part of multi-layered contexts that are characterized by interdependencies as well as tensions and contradictions.

This chapter traces the emergence of a prosthetic modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It suggests that the literature of the fin de siècle, from Bellamy and Wells to Gilman and Wilde, registers a shifted relation between the interior and the exterior of being and between the figurations of surface and depth in the artwork, produced by the development of a new period in the history of modernity. This shifted relation is discernible in the late-century realism, but it is in the first stirrings of the modernist form that it comes to a new kind of expression. The chapter reads this new modernist relation between inside and outside, between surface and depth, as it is given expression in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James, particularly in The House of Mirth, and in What Maisie Knew. These works depict a duplication of consciousness, a sense that the novel imagination encounters itself always at remove from itself, but they also produce a new formal means of giving this duplicated consciousness a unity, of bringing depths onto the modernist surface of the artwork.