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Split Ends? Literature and Politics at the Fin De Siecle
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Macleod, Jock |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | 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 siecle 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. About fifteen to twenty years ago, the^n de siecle started to come into a much sharper scholarly focus. Although the sense of a transition towards modernism occasionally remained (and still remains) as something of an organising principle, the new scholarship focused on the period as one of shifting cultural and social tectonics in which key categories, discourses, formations, and institutions were riven by intense conflict and contradiction. An exemplary, though by no means exhaustive, list of works appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s would include Linda Dowling's Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle and Regenia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (both 1986), John Stokes's In the Nineties (1989), Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Ian Small's Conditions of Criticism (1991), and Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London and Karl Beckson's London in the 1890s (both 1992). These works laid down new directions for thinking about late Victorian literary culture. They were cultural as much as literary histories, and they brought to our attention the importance (and fascination) of the period, whether understood as the 'nineties or as a longer moment, starting in the 'eighties or even the 'seventies, to the point where now the fin probably receives more scholarly attention than any other part of the Victorian period. Most critically, they examined both the politics of culture and the cultural politics of those decades, opening the way for a rush of later books on the construction and representation of gender and diverse sexualities, on empire and race, and on the ways in which these problems of identity intersected with multiple experiences of modernity. Much of this later work concerned itself with popular culture (especially the gothic and detective fiction), as it was here the anxieties and fears of a generation were most clearly played out. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1017/S1060150307051728 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/18146/47187_1.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150307051728 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
