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The fin-de-siecle period--roughly the years 1880 to 1900--was characterized by great cultural and political ambivalence, an anxiety for things lost, and a longing for the new. It also included an outpouring of intellectual responses to the conflicting times from such eminent writers as T. H.
Huxley, Emma Goldman, William James, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. In this important anthology, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students, scholars, and general readers a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the
fin-de-siecle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical
Research, Sexology, Anthropology, and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes that carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.
The fin-de-siecle period--roughly the years 1880 to 1900--was characterized by great cultural and political ambivalence, an anxiety for things lost, and a longing for the new. It also included an outpouring of intellectual responses to the conflicting times from such eminent writers as T. H.
Huxley, Emma Goldman, William James, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. In this important anthology, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students, scholars, and general readers a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the
fin-de-siecle years. That history is here shown to inaugurate many enduring critical and cultural concerns, with sections on Degeneration, Outcast London, The Metropolis, The New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical
Research, Sexology, Anthropology, and Racial Science. Each section begins with an Introduction and closes with Editorial Notes that carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.
Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst: Introduction: Reading the Fin de
Siècle
Editors' Note
One: Degeneration
1: E. Ray Lankester: Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism
(1880)
2: H. G. Wells: 'Zoological Retrogression' (1891)
3: Max Nordau: Degeneration (1895)
4: [Egmont Hake]: Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau (1895)
5: William James:
6: G. B. Shaw: The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current
Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1895/1908)
Two: Outcast London
1: Andrew Mearns: The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883)
2: W. T. Stead: The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885)
3: Charles Booth:
4: William Booth: In Darkest England - and the Way Out (1890)
Three: The Metropolis
1: Gustave Le Bon: 'The Mind of Crowds', The Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind (1895)
2: Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)
3: Arthur Symons: At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations
(1896)
4: Mrs. Ormiston Chant: Why We Attacked the Empire (1895)
Four: The New Woman
1: Mona Caird: Marriage (1888)
2: Character Note: The New Woman (1894):
3: Ella Hepworth Dixon: Why Women are Ceasing to Marry (1899)
4: Sarah Grand: The New Aspect of the Woman Question (1894)
5: Grant Allen: Plain Words on the Woman Question (1889)
6: M. Eastwood: The New Woman in Fiction and Fact (1894)
7: Mrs. Humphrey Ward et al: An Appeal Against Female Suffrage
(1889)
8: Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Female Suffrage: A Reply (1889)
Five: Literary Debates
1: Andrew Lang: Realism and Romance (1886)
2: Arthur Symons: The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893)
3: Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton, Thomas Hardy: Candour in
English Fiction (1890)
4: Hugh Stutfield: Tommyrotics (1895)
5: Editorial Comment, Daily Telegraph (March 14, 1891)
6: Arthur Symons: Henrik Ibsen (1889)
Six: The New Imperialism
The forward policy
1: Robert Seeley: The Expansion of England (1883)
2: Joseph Chamberlain: The True Conception of Empire (1897)
3: Cecil Rhodes: speech at Drill Hall, Cape Town (July 18,
1899)
Reportage
4: General Gordon, The Illustrated London News (Feb 14, 1885)
5: Major F. R. Wingate from the original manuscripts of Father
Ohrwalder: Ten Years Captivity in the Mahdi's Camp 1882-92
(1893)
6: G. W. Steevens: The Battle of Omdurman, With Kitchener to
Khartum (1898)
7: Relief of Mafeking and London's Roar of Jubilation, Daily Mail
(May 19, 1900)
8: Affairs on the Upper Congo, The Times (May 14, 1897)
Critique
9: R. B. Cunningham Graham: Bloody Niggers (1897)
10: Olive Schreiner: An English South African's View of the
Situation (1899)
11: J. A. Hobson: Imperialism: A Study (1902)
12: E. D. Morel: The Story of the Congo Free State (1920)
Seven: Socialism
1: William Morris: How We Live and How We might Live (1887)
2: George Bernard Shaw: The Economic Basis of Socialism (1889)
3: Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
4: Isabella O. Ford: Women and Socialism (1907)
Eight: Anarchism
1: Peter Kropotkin: Words of a Rebel (1885)
2: Johann Most: Anarchy (1888)
3: William Morris: Letter to Commonweal (May 18, 1889)
4: Anarchist, Letter to Commonweal (June 22, 1889):
5: The Explosion in Greenwich Park and Bourdin's Antecedents, The
Times (February 17, 1894):
6: Emma Goldman: Anarchism: What it Really Stands for (1911)
Nine: Scientific Naturalism
1: T. H. Huxley: On the Physical Basis of Life (1870)
2: W. K. Clifford: On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific
Thought (1872)
3: John Tyndall: Belfast Address, British Association (1874)
4: Karl Pearson: A Grammar of Science (1892)
5: T. H. Huxley: Evolution and Ethics (1893)
Ten: Psychology
1: H. B. Donkin: Hysteria, Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
(1893)
2: Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud: On the Psychical Mechanism of
hysterical phenomena (1893)
3: F. W. H. Myers: The Subliminal Consciousness (1891)
4: William James: The Stream of Thought, The Principles of
Psychology (1890)
5: Clifford Allbutt: Nervous Diseases and Modern Life (1895)
Eleven: Psychical Research
1: Objects of the Society (1882):
2: Henry Sidgwick: Address of the President at the First General
Meeting (1882)
3: Psychical Research, Pall Mall Gazette (Oct 21, 1882)
4: William Barrett, Edmund Gurney and F.W.H. Myers: Thought-Reading
(1882)
5: W. T. Stead: How We intend to Study Borderland (1893)
6: W. T. Stead: My Experience of Automatic Writing (1893)
7: Andrew Lang: Ghosts up to Date (1894)
Twelve: Sexology
1: Gustave Bouchereau: Nymphomania in Dictionary of Psychological
Medicine (1893)
2: Richard von Krafft-Ebing: Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
3: Edward Carpenter: The Intermediate Sex (1894/1906)
4: John Addington Symonds: A Problem in Modern Ethics, being an
inquiry into the phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed
especially to medical psychologists and jurists (1896)
5: Case XVIII [John Addington Symonds], Havelock Ellis, Sexual
Inversion (1897):
Thirteen: Anthropology and Racial Science
1: Edward Tylor: The Culture of Science, Primitive Culture
(1871)
2: Herbert Spencer: The Primitive Man - Physical, The Primitive Man
- Emotional, The Primitive Man - Intellectual, The Principles of
Sociology (1876)
3: Karl Pearson: National Life from the Standpoint of Science
(1900)
4: Francis Galton: Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims
(1903)
5: Mary Kingsley: The Clash of Cultures, West African Studies
(1899)
6: Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres
Straits (volume II): Preface by A. C. Haddon and Introduction by W.
H. R. Rivers (1901)
Sources of Material
Secondary Reading
Index
Sally Ledger is Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College,
University of London
Roger Luckhurst is Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College,
University of London
All the essays....are....informative and lucidly written.
*English Literature in Translation 1880-1920*
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