Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Stefano Evangelista
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198864248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers' attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism--or world citizenship--informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Stefano Evangelista
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198864248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The fin de siècle witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers' attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. Focussing on literature written in English, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a distinctive feature of the literary modernity of this important period of transition. No longer conceived purely as an abstract philosophical ideal, cosmopolitanism--or world citizenship--informed the actual, living practices of authors and readers who sought new ways of relating local and global identities in an increasingly interconnected world. The book presents literary cosmopolitanism as a field of debate and controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light the variety of literary responses to the idea of world citizenship that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness; it investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents the literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siecle Literature, Culture and the Arts

Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siecle Literature, Culture and the Arts PDF Author: Josephine M. Guy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474408923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
The late nineteenth-century fin de siècle has proved an enduringly fascinating moment in literary and cultural history. It is associated with the emergence of intriguing figures - such as the 'new woman' and 'uranian'; with contradictory impulses - of decadence and decay on the one hand, and of experiment and renewal, on the other; as well as with unprecedented intercultural exchange, especially between Britain and France. The 22 newly-commissioned essays collected here re-examine some of the key concepts taken to define the fin de siècle, while also introducing hitherto overlooked cultural phenomena into the frame, such as the importance of humanitarianism. The impact of recent research in material culture is explored, particularly how the history of the book and the history of performance culture is changing our understanding of this period. A wide range of cultural activities is discussed?from participation in avant-garde theatre to interior decoration and from the writing of poetry to political and religious activism. Together, the essays provide new scholarly insights into British fin de siècle and enrich our understanding of this complex period, while paying particular attention to the importance of regionalism.

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 PDF Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198881002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting from Oscar Wilde's Victorian vision of Egypt and Arthur Symons's and Violet Fane's image of Constantinople, it moves to Paul Scheerbart's and Else Lasker-Schüler's Decadent Babylon and Assyria and concludes by turning to Stefan George's exclusion of the East from his poetic practice. The geographical reach of the East focuses on regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. The cultural translation of specifically the Middle East into different European national contexts gains new—sometimes oppositional—meanings, avoiding a one-sided representation of both the East and the two national literatures that absorbed it. In arguing for a Decadent cosmopolitanism as a model of heterogeneous inclusivity that reaches beyond the binaries established by Edward Said's Orientalism, the present book brings twenty-first century theories of cosmopolitanism into dialogue with art history and literature to uncover striking synergies and interdependences between the different manifestations of Decadence in England and Germany.

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 PDF Author: Katharina Herold-Zanker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198880979
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.

Walter Pater's European Imagination

Walter Pater's European Imagination PDF Author: Lene Østermark-Johansen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192674692
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Walter Pater's European Imagination addresses Pater's literary cosmopolitanism as the first in-depth study of his fiction in dialogue with European literature. Pater's short pieces of fiction, the so-called 'imaginary portraits', trace the development of the European self over a period of some two thousand years. They include elements of travelogue and art criticism, together with discourses on myth, history, and philosophy. Examining Pater's methods of composition, use of narrative voice, and construction of character, the book draws on all of Pater's oeuvre and includes discussions of a range of his unpublished manuscripts, essays, and reviews. It engages with Pater's dialogue with the visual portrait and problematises the oscillation between type and individual, the generic and the particular, which characterises both the visual and the literary portrait. Exploring Pater's involvement with nineteenth-century historiography and collective memory, the book positions Pater's fiction solidly within such nineteenth-century genres as the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, while also discussing the portraits as specimens of biographical writing. As the 'Ur-texts' from which generations of modernist life-writing developed, Pater's 'imaginary portraits' became pivotal for such modernist writers as Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson. Walter Pater's European Imagination explores such twentieth-century successors, together with French contemporaries like Sainte-Beuve and followers like Marcel Schwob.

Decadent Conservatism

Decadent Conservatism PDF Author: Alex Murray
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192858203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of the art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatism turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.

Romantic Cosmopolitanism

Romantic Cosmopolitanism PDF Author: E. Wohlgemut
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230250998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Romantic Cosmopolitanism shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation that stands in contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke's which found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood and geography.

Narratives of Enlightenment

Narratives of Enlightenment PDF Author: Karen O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521465338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America; and it investigates the nature and degree of their intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation. Karen O'Brien combines the methodologies of literary criticism and intellectual history to explore debates about Enlightenments and the political uses of narrative. Where previous studies have emphasised the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, she reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century

Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Tanya Agathocleous
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521762642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Traces the development of cosmopolitanism and the growing importance of the city in nineteenth-century literature.

Cosmopolitan Style

Cosmopolitan Style PDF Author: Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Publisher: [email protected]
ISBN: 9780231137508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking work which links the novels of modernist, contemporary, and postcolonial authors to rethink the political nature of cosmopolitanism.