The Fin-de-Siècle World

Front matter

ted by MICHAEL SALER

THE FIN-DE-SIECLE WORLD

This comprehensive, beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating period in history, the fin de siècle. Featuring contributions from nearly fifty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval across all walks of life and is truly innovative in examining the fin de siécle from a global perspective. The volume includes pathbreaking essays on how the period was experienced not only in Europe and North America, but also in China, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, India, and elsewhere across the globe.

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— Contents —

Britain Nicholas Daly

Central Europe Suzanne Marchand

Russia Olga Matich

Italy Walter Adamson

Spain Lara Anderson

The United States Richard Cándida Smith

Canada D. M. R. Bentley

Latin America Adela Pineda Franco

Did China have a fin de siècle?

Maura Dykstra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Japan Selçuk Esenbel

The Middle East Jens Hanssen

India Ruth Vanita

Africa Rebecca Saunders

PART III: POLITICS IN A NEW KEY The new nationalism Timothy Baycroft

The New Imperialism Sascha Auerbach

The New Politics of ‘Higher Individualism’

Chris Nottingham vill

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— Contents —

PART IV: MASS CULTURE 365 23 Publishing 367 Christopher Hilliard

25 Consumer culture and advertising 392 H. Hazel Hahn

PART V: DISCIPLINES 409 26 The universities and the human sciences AIT Peter Mandler

27 Philosophy 424 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

28 The “new physics” 441 Helge Kragh

29 Biology and eugenics 456 Marius Turda

30 Psychology and psychiatry 471 Eric Shiraev

31 Medicine 487 Andrew Smith

Part Vii: Religion And Spirituality 535

34 Secularism/atheism/agnosticism 537 Vincent P. Pecora

35 The Jewish fin de siécle 554 Olga Litvak

36 Christianity 568 Vincent Lloyd

— Contents — Islam Marwa Elshakry

2444 AN: Buddhism Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

New Age fin de siécle Gary Lachman

PART VIII: AESTHETICS Music and the Gesamtkunstwerk Mark Berry

The visual arts Michelle Facos

The cinema Tom Gunning

Scientific romance, fantasy and the supernatural Roger Luckhurst

Children’s literature Seth Lerer

Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS o>

FIGURES

Illustration of a railway coach on Ginza Brick Masonry Street in Tokyo (Utagawa Kuniteru II 1882) © 2012

Tokyo Metropolitan Library. All rights reserved.

Café Josty in Berlin © Tropea, Robert/Landesarchiv Berlin. Chicago traffic jam, circa 1910. Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.

Portrait of Loie Fuller, 1902 © Lebrecht Music & Arts. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by Umberto Boccioni © Mattioli Collection, Milan, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright © Nikhilesh Haval.

On the Boulevard Montmartre by Jean Beraud (1880)

© Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

The grand staircase of the Opéra-Garnier, 1860-75

© Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Bird’s-eye view of the Eiffel Tower at the time of the opening of the Paris Exposition of 1889 © Universal History Archive/ UIG/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) seated beside his work in his studio © Archives Larousse, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

The Black Stain by Albert Bettanier (1887). Courtesy of the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Anonymous photograph of Hubertine Auclert, leading French feminist and campaigner for women’s suffrage, ro April 1848-4 August 1914 © Leemage/Lebrecht Music & Arts.

Isle of the Dead by Arnold Bocklin © akg-images.

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109 135

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— Illustrations —

The Secession Building in Vienna, designed by Joseph Olbrich © lucarista/Shutterstock.

The Fagus Factory in Alfeld, Germany, designed by Walter Gropius. This is an important example of early modern architecture in the world © Takashi Images/Shutterstock.

The Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest © Irina Bondareva/ Shutterstock.

House in mountain style, Zakopane, Poland © Janusz Pienkowski/Shutterstock.

Detail from Medicine by Gustav Klimt © akg-images.

Composition No. 7, 1913, by Vassily Kandinsky. Courtesy of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library. Zinaida Gippius by Léon Bakst, 1906. © The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

Fokine/Rubinstein/Nizhinsky, La Maison des Danseuses © akg-images.

Costume for Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra by Léon Bakst, 1909

© akg-images.

Woman kneeling on her bed to turn out the light of a gas lamp, her clothes on a chair, from the “New York City Life” series, 1905. Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries, New York/Image © Trustees

of the British Museum.

“The Storming of San Juan Hill,” poster for William H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee, circa 1898. Courtesy of The Library of Congress. “Lagoon at Night, Luna Park, Coney Island,” 1905 © New

York Public Library, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Wall-painting of Mt. Pelée earthquake, Martinique, 1902, in Ulabi House, Old City, Damascus. Photographer: Stefan Weber, Collection Stefan Weber. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Painting by William Simpson showing soldiers and sailors looting the Kaiser Bagh Palace in Lucknow in northern India during the so-called “Indian Mutiny” of 1857 (known in India as the First

War of Indian Independence). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1822-77), last King of Awadh.

Group of courtesans, 1800-25 © San Diego Museum of

Art, USA/Edwin Binney 3rd Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. La collection anthropologique du prince Bonaparte (Prince Bonaparte’s anthropological collection), Exposition Universelle de Paris (anthropological gallery), 1889 © BnF, Département des Cartes et Plans, Société de géographie, Sg W 63 (5).

Poster for the Asante Exhibit at the Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, Paris, 1887 © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Commemorative head of an Oba, Benin, late 18th to early

19th century © African School/Musée Quai Branly,

Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Veteran Amazonian warriors of Dahomey photographed

by Frangois-Edmond Fortier.

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285 286

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— Illustrations —

Portrait of Muhammad Ahmad (1844-85), known as the Mahdi © De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/The Bridgeman

Art Library.

Prestige drinking vessel in the form of a head from the Central African Kuba culture © Werner Forman Archive/The Bridgeman Art Library.

King Cetshwayo of the Zulus, photographed in London circa 188t.

“The Rhodes Colossus,” Punch, rto December 1892. Cecil Rhodes is depicted holding aloft a telegraph line linking the Cape Colony to Egypt © Mary Evans Picture Library.

One of the most infamous of the Belgian policies implemented in the Congo was the punishment of death or serious mutilation for failure to meet rubber-farming quotas © Morel, E. D. (Edmund Dene), 1873-1924/New York Public Library.

South African Native National Congress delegation sent to London in 1914 to protest the 1913 Natives Land Act.

Back row: Walter Rubusana, Saul Nsane; front row:

Thomas Mapikela, John L. Dube, Solomon T. Plaatje

© akg-images/Africa Media Online.

The Morning Chronicle, 8 March 1904. The image depicts

the London County Council, represented as the Angel of Progressivism, slaying the hydra of Conservatism, corrupt privilege, moral turpitude, and cheap Chinese labor.

“Maison Ström,” L'Illustration, 1911.

Georges Meunier, poster for French State Railway, 1893. Dadabhai Naoroji, The Grand Old Man of India, 1914

© Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Illustration of Ida B. Wells from The Afro-American press

and its editors, by I. Garland Penn, 1891. Courtesy of The Library of Congress.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), African American scholar, writer and civil rights activist © Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Photograph of Duse Mohamed Ali. © New York Public Library, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Wagner and Kaiser Wilhelm I open the Bayreuth Theatre

in 1876. Liszt stands on Wagner’s right.© Private Collection/Look and Learn/Rosenberg Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library. The Death of Pelléas, Act IV, Scene 4 of Pelléas et Mélisande

by Debussy, from a photograph of the first production in

April 1902 of the opera at the Opéra-Comique in Paris

© Bibliothéque des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Paja Jovanović, Migration of the Serbs, 1896. Courtesy

of the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church,

Belgrade, Serbia.

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347 394 395 523

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— Illustrations —

Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, completed 1889. Bronze, life-size. Calais, France. Courtesy of Per Nordahl. Historical artwork of a young girl watching a man using a Praxinoscope. Invented by Emile Reynaud in 1879, it was

a nineteenth-century novelty item that was a precursor to modern cinematography © Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library. and 42.3 Two stills from A Trip to the Moon/ Voyage dans la Lune, a 1902 film directed by Georges Méliés, French illusionist and filmmaker © RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts.

MAPS

West Africa in the era of the “Scramble.” © History of Africa, third edition, by Kevin Shillington (Palgrave Macmillan). Map of the European zones of control in Africa, 1914.

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308 342

Walter Adamson is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Intellectual History at Emory

University. He is the author of Embattled Avant-gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Chicago, 2007); Avant-garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Harvard, 1993); Marx and the Disillusionment of Marxism (California, 1985); and Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (California, 1980).

Lara Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the

University of Melbourne, Australia. Her main research focus is Spanish culinary culture, from the role of gastronomy in Spain’s fin-de-siécle identity formation to Spanish cookery television shows as a site for gender critique.

Sascha Auerbach is a Lecturer in the History Department of the University of

Nottingham, where he specializes in British legal culture and imperial labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His first monograph, Race, Law, and “the Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain, was published in 2009. The research and writing for his contribution to this volume was made possible by generous support from the US-UK Fulbright Commission, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, King’s College London, and the University of Northern British Columbia.

Timothy Baycroft is a Senior Lecturer in French History at the University of

Sheffield. He has written on nationalism, identity, border studies, regionalism, and memory, and his main publications include: France: Inventing the Nation; Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; and two jointly edited collections: What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 and Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century.

D. M. R. Bentley is a Distinguished University Professor and the Carl F. Klinck

Professor in Canadian Literature at Western University in London, Canada. He has published widely in the fields of Canadian literature and culture and Victorian literature and art. His books include The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on

XV the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690-1990; Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada; Canadian Architexts: Essays on Canadian Literature and Architecture, 1959-2006, and The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Mark Berry is Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously taught at the University of Cambridge. He is an intellectual and musical historian, who has written widely on European history from the later seventeenth century onwards. The author of Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ (2006) and After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to Nono (2014).

Richard Candida Smith is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches intellectual and cultural history of the United States. He served as director of the Regional Oral History Office from 2001 to 2012. His books have explored the social position of the fine arts in modern, liberal societies, often with a focus on California.

Nicholas Daly teaches at University College Dublin, and is the author of Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siécle (1999), Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000 (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City (2015), and essays in such journals as Victorian Studies and the Journal of Victorian Culture.

Andrew Denning is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History of Alpine Skiing (California, 2015), and his work has previously appeared in Central European History and Environmental History.

Petra Dierkes-Thrun is a Lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department and the Program for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University and the author of Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Michigan, 2011). Her research and teaching interests range across British and European fin-de-siécle and modernist studies (including literature, visual arts, cinema, opera, and dance), feminist and LGBTQ studies, and digital pedagogy in the humanities.

Maura Dykstra is an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. She studies the history of the relationship between law, administration, and economic governance in Qing China.

Marwa Elshakry teaches history of science at Columbia University and has recently published Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (Chicago, 2013).

Selcuk Esenbel is Professor of History at Boğaziçi University. Among her many works are Japan, Turkey, and the World of Islam: The Writings of Selcuk Esenbel (Global Oriental Brill, zorr) and American-Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture 1830-1989 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), with Nur Bilge Criss, Tony Greenwood, and Louis Mazzari.

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Michelle Facos teaches art history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century European art, particularly that of Germany and Scandinavia, issues of identity, and Symbolist art. She is the author of An Introduction of Nineteenth-Century Art (Routledge, 2011) and Symbolist Art in Context (California, 2009).

Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of numerous books including Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, 1996) and Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2008).

Regenia Gagnier is Professor of English at the University of Exeter, editor of Literature Compass’s Global Circulation Project, and Senior Research Fellow in Egenis, Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. From 2009-12 she was President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. Her books include Idylls of the Marketplace (Stanford, 1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain (Oxford, 1991); The Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago, 2000); Individualism, Decadence and Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Tom Gunning is Distinguished Service Professor in the Department on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago and author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Illinois), The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), and over a hundred articles.

H. Hazel Hahn is Associate Professor of History at Seattle University. She is the author of Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and is a co-editor of Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent through History (Hong Kong & Hawai’i, 2013).

Jens Hanssen is an Associate Professor of Arab and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Fin de Siécle Beirut (Oxford, 2005). He has authored two co-edited volumes: Empire in the City (Beirut, 2002) and History, Space and Social Conflict in Beirut (Beirut, 2005). His writings have appeared in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Critical Inquiry, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and hannaharendt.net — Zeitschrift für politisches Denken.

Ann Heilmann is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, UK. The author of New Woman Fiction (Palgrave, 2000), New Woman Strategies (Manchester, 2004), and (with Mark Llewellyn) Neo-Victorianism (Palgrave, 2010), she has co-edited four essay collections and a scholarly edition of George Moore.

Christopher Hilliard is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of English as a Vocation: The ‘Scrutiny’ Movement (Oxford, 2012) and To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Harvard, 2006).

John Jervis is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where he researches and writes about modernity, modernism, and the patterns of culture in the modern West since the eighteenth century. His most recent works are Sensational Subjects: the Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World xvii and Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World (both Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). His previous books are Exploring the Modern (Blackwell, 1998) and Transgressing the Modern (Blackwell, 2000), and he co-edited Uncanny Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Stephen Kern is Professor of History at Ohio State University. He published The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Harvard, 1983, 2003) and recently The Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2011).

Andreas Killen is Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written widely on German history and the history of psychiatry. His publications include Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (California, 2006) and a co-edited volume of the journal Grey Room titled “On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare” (2011).

Helge Kragh is Professor of History of Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His main scholarly interest is the modern history of the physical sciences, including cosmology. He has also published on the historical relations between science and religion.

Gary Lachman is the author of more than a dozen books on the meeting ground between consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition including Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, and In Search of P. D. Ouspensky. He contributes to several journals in the US and UK and lectures frequently on his work in the UK, US, and Europe. Born in New Jersey, since 1996 he has lived in London. His website can be found at garylachman.co.uk.

Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, where he served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009-14. His publications include Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Criticism, and the memoir Prospero’s Son (Chicago).

Olga Litvak holds the Leffell Chair in Modern Jewish History at Clark University. A specialist in the intellectual and cultural lives of Jews in Eastern Europe, Litvak is the author of Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Indiana, 2006) and Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (Rutgers, 2012).

Mark Llewellyn is John Anderson Research Professor at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Together with Ann Heilmann he has published extensively on the late-Victorian writer George Moore, including The Collected Short Stories (Pickering and Chatto, 2007) and the forthcoming George Moore: Influence and Collaboration (University of Delaware Press, Rowman and Littlefield).

Vincent Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His publications include The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford, 2011), Black Natural Law: Beyond Secularism and Multiculturalism (Oxford, forthcoming), and a co-edited collection, Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh (Routledge, 2014). He co-edits the journal Political Theology.

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Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He currently serves as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and as chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His recent books include The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography (Princeton, 2011), The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (Yale, 2012), From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chicago, 2013), and, with Robert Buswell, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton, 2013). In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Roger Luckhurst teaches in the School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London. Recent books include The Mummy’s Curse (Oxford, 2012) and The Shining (BFI Film Classics, 2013).

Peter Mandler is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College. His most recent book is Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (Yale, 2013).

Suzanne Marchand is Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her research focuses on the history of scholarship in modern Germany and Austria. She has written two monographs, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, 1996), and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), and co-authored two textbooks: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (W. W. Norton; 4th edition, 2014) and Many Europes (McGraw Hill, 2013).

Olga Matich is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written about early Russian modernism (Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siécle, 2005); Andrey Bely (Petersburg/ Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921, 2010); visual and verbal arts (“On the History of Cloud: Wassily Kandinsky, Andrey Bely, and Others,” New Literary Review 210, 2010 [in Russian]); cultural history (“Mobster Gravestones in t990s Russia,” Global Crime, 7/1, 2006); and Russian émigré literature. She is director and author of the digital project Mapping Petersburg (http://petersburg. berkeley.edu/).

Mark S. Micale is Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana- Champaign, where he teaches modern European cultural and intellectual history and the history of science and medicine. His books include Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (2008), The Mind of Modernism (2004), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1860-1930 (with Paul Lerner, 2001), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (with Roy Porter, 1994), and Beyond the Unconscious (1993). He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1987.

Chris Nottingham is Emeritus Reader in Contemporary History of Glasgow Caledonian University and was for some years Visiting Research Fellow of the University of Amsterdam. He has recently published (with Stephen Bailey)

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Heartlands, A Guide to D. H. Lawrence’s Midland Roots and is currently working on a critical reader of Havelock Ellis’s writings (with Jana Funke of the University of Exeter).

Vincent P. Pecora is the Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago, 2006). Secularization without End: Becket, Mann, Coetzee (Notre Dame) will be published in 2015.

Adela Pineda Franco is an Associate Professor at Boston University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish American literature, culture, and film, and on the relationship between politics and culture. She is the author of several publications, including Geopoliticas de la cultura finisecular en Buenos Aires, Paris y México: las revistas literarias y el modernismo, a book on the transatlantic literary practices of fin-de-siécle Latin American authors.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches US intellectual and cultural history. She is the author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago, 2012).

Rebecca Saunders teaches global literatures, cultural theory, and African studies at Illinois State University. Her work focuses on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and African literatures and cultures. She is the author of Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture and numerous articles; the co-author of The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue; and former co-editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Eric Shiraev is a professor, researcher, and author working and living in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. He took his academic degrees at St. Petersburg University in Russia and completed a postdoctoral program in the United States at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is an author, co-author, and co-editor of fourteen books and numerous publications in the fields of cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, political psychology, and comparative studies.

Andrew Smith is Reader in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. His sixteen published books include Gothic Radicalism (2000), Victorian Demons (2004), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), and The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010). He is a past President of the International Gothic Association.

Laura Tabili is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. Her most recent book is Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her scholarship explores how European global expansion shaped class, labor migration, interracial and exogamous marriages, and the racialization of masculinity.

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Marius Turda is Reader in Central and Eastern European Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University (UK). His recent publications include Latin Eugenics in International Context (Bloomsbury, 2014); Eugenics and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Hungary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Crafting Humans: From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond (V&R Unipress, 2013); and The History of Eugenics in East Central Europe, 1900-1945: Sources and Commentaries (Bloomsbury 2015).

Ruth Vanita, Professor at the University of Montana, former Reader in English, Delhi University, India, was founding co-editor of Manushi, India’s first nationwide feminist journal, 1978—90. She is a well-known translator of fiction and poetry from Hindi to English, and has also published widely on Shakespeare, in journals such as Shakespeare Survey. She is the author of several books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination; Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West; Gandhi's Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture, and A Play of Light: Selected Poems. With Saleem Kidwai, she edited Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. Her latest book, Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780-1870, appeared in 2012.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California at Irvine, where he also serves as editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, 2009) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2010 and 2013 editions), and the editor or co-editor of six others. In addition to writing for a wide spectrum of academic journals, his reviews and commentaries have appeared in many newspapers and magazines.

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INTRODUCTION circles, studies of the fin de siècle have become steadily more encompassing since they first appeared in the early twentieth century. The Fin-de-Siécle World represents the Third Wave of approaches to this fascinating, complex, and transitional historical period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fin de siécle has most often been studied as a Western phenomenon and cast as a distinct yet amorphous interval spanning late “Victorianism” and early “Modernism”. This volume both continues and departs from that tradition. In order to explain how and why, we need to briefly survey earlier scholarship that navigated its slippery contours and charted some of its most glistening features.

Je as the plash of a pebble in a pond produces expanding concentric

THE FIRST WAVE

Contemporaries began to memorialize the period, accounting for the First Wave of writings on the fin de siécle prior to World War I. They defined it largely in terms of the new aesthetic movements in Western Europe and North America of the 1890s that challenged traditional cultural norms and practices, and located its epicenters in Paris and London. First Wave interpreters claimed that the fin de siécle expressed a contradictory Zeitgeist peculiar to its chronological moment: the “Spirit of the Time” emphasized both cultural decline and spiritual rebirth. Some artists exalted “Decadence,” bolstered by the impending end of a century that many critics decried as narrowly materialistic and insufferably bourgeois. Others, however, welcomed the new century for its promise of political, social, and spiritual renewal. Revealingly, many — like the novelist M. P. Shiel, whose “Decadent” fictions could also herald the Ubermensch — did both.

These overlapping themes of “decline” and “rebirth” were not central to the 1888 French play Fin de Siècle by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard, but its terse title soon became a catchphrase among artists — including the ever-quotable Oscar Wilde (Teich and Porter 1991: 3). By 1893, “fin de siècle” had become a generational label sported by those who rejected earlier Victorian cultural moral codes and trumpeted new aesthetic and social possibilities. As a writer for the English journal The Art Critic explained to his perplexed audience in “What is the Fin de Siécle?”:

All... who rush head over heels with new ideas towards the zoth century are hommes et femmes fin de siécle. Who are its leading representatives? Young authors and artists with an indescribable enthusiasm ... who assert without exception that they are the prophets of something (nobody knows what) glorious to come.

It soon became clear, however, that the fin de siécle of the 1890s had both illustrious antecedents and significant successors. The radiating circle encapsulating it needed to encompass its roots in the 1880s, even the 1870s, and its continued developments until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Holbrook Jackson, one of the earliest to capture the floating-butterfly features of the aesthetic fin de siècle, broadened its chronology; others followed his lead. Jackson’s 1913 account — entitled The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century — acknowledged that “the Eighteen Nineties were unique only in method and in the emphasis they gave to certain circumstances and ideas. The Eighteen Eighties and late Seventies had been even more ‘artistic’ than the Nineties” (Jackson 1913: 24).

THE SECOND WAVE

The Second Wave of scholarship after the war tended to confirm this loose periodization of the fin de siécle from 1870 to 1914, with some accounts plumping for its origins in the 1880s, and a few holding firm for the 1890s. It also significantly expanded the period’s remit from an aesthetic movement within late Victorian culture to a socio-cultural moment within the larger story of Western “modernity.” Carl Schorske cast the first pebble in this direction in his Fin-de-Siécle Vienna, an influential 1980 collection of essays. (Several had been published during the previous two decades, generating intellectual ripples of their own; the volume itself produced a cascade.) Schorske examined the artistic and intellectual innovations emerging from the hothouse environment of late nineteenth-century Vienna to demonstrate that “The fertile ground of the cultural elements, and the basis of their cohesion, was a shared social experience in the broadest sense” (Schorske 1980: xxiii).

This conjunction of aesthetic modernism with the processes of modernization soon became the norm for studies of the fin de siècle in Europe and the United States. Scholars now demonstrated that the cultural movements discussed by First Wave scholars, such as Aestheticism, Impressionism, Decadence, Symbolism, Realism and Naturalism, both expressed and fostered wider changes in the political, social, intellectual, economic, religious, and scientific milieus of turn-of-the-century Europe and North America. All of these domains were interlinked elements of this complex period that needed to be comprehended holistically. How could one discuss aesthetic “Decadence”, let alone the German critic Max Nordau’s influential 1893 screed Degeneration, without also discussing Eugenics, Social Darwinism, the “New Physics”, or the bellicose stance of the European “New Nationalism”? Or understand