The Making of a Media Category Colligan, Colette
Media history,
04/2022, Letnik:
ahead-of-print, Številka:
ahead-of-print
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As early as the late eighteenth century, there were English-language periodicals published from Paris. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when well-capitalised American periodicals ...began to be launched from the city, that a transnational English-language press in the city began to develop into a distinctive media category. This essay examines the activities surrounding these periodicals at the time, following Bruno Latour's sociology of action, which holds that we can learn about social actors and cultural productions by following their activities and their controversies. The intense journalistic activities of these periodicals during this period left many traces, revealing a little-known media history of start-ups and experiments, innovation and failure, and association and rivalry, as well as group making and community building. These activities also capture a particular moment in the history of the transnational press in Paris when a rather undefined type of journalism and public became something more both within the city and throughout Europe. To examine how these periodicals were referring to each other, establishing journalistic practices, developing infrastructure, and chronicling their own histories is to witness how they were in the process of constituting themselves as a distinctive transnational media formation. By following journalism in action, we can uncover this transnational media history in the making.
This article examines how the New Woman's premature aging happens in tandem with patriarchal marriage at the fin de siècle through a scrutiny of Sarah Grand's New Woman novel, The Heavenly Twins ...(1893/1992). The novel is a narrative of female degeneration, in which its three young and married New Woman characters become impuissant to realize the cumbersome feminized ideals of national regeneration and age or die prematurely in their twenties. Their premature decline is caused by moral and sexual degeneration of their military husbands who practice the ideology of progress at the imperial frontier. In the article, I explain how the patriarchal culture of the late Victorian society expedites women's aging process in marriage. The symptoms of mental and physical sickness experienced by the novel's Victorian wives in their twenties are a product not merely of excruciating syphilis but also the patriarchal culture. I ultimately contend that Grand unveils the other side of the male-oriented ideology of progress in criticizing the late Victorian reality where there is negligible scope for the New Woman's vision of female-led regeneration.
•Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893/1992) portrays the chronologically young New Woman's premature aging at the late nineteenth century.•Within the turn-of-the-century context, a cultural intersection of old and new produced a literary trope of premature aging.•Many pathological symptoms of mental and physical sickness experienced by the novel's Victorian wives in their twenties are suggested as a product of the patriarchal culture.
H. G. Wells’s serial fable
(1902) offers a satirical commentary on the Victorian Age: It draws a societal allegory that criticises both a cohesive conception of the natural world, and Victorian ...notions of the domestic realm – in the private and national sense of the term. Yet the story has long been regarded as an oddity in the author’s oeuvre. Wells’s Victorian contemporaries criticised its lack of scientific detail so characteristic of his more successful scientific romances. The reason for this appears to be the story’s eponymous central figure – a mermaid, supposedly rather the stuff of legend, folklore and fairy tales. However, by opening up a utopian realm in which ‘better dreams’ await, the figure of the sea lady destabilises Victorian moral orders as a potential discovery of the future lingers on the horizon of the century’s turn. In this article, I foreground the story’s ecofeminist potential by analysing the intersections between its unconventional form, the ‘untameable female’ protagonist at its centre, and the specific oceanic and littoral environments it presents.
Résumé Dans la fin-de-siècle, la foule fait peur pour une raison : elle peut faire chuter la société actuelle dans les pays développés. Nous sommes dans l’Europe de la fin du XIX e siècle, plus ...précisément entre la France et l’Italie. Les auteurs qui étudient la foule (des sociologues, des psychologues, des biologistes) pensent que la civilisation européenne est arrivée à la fin. L’Europe est menacée par les néo-barbares qui composent la foule, et desséchée à l’intérieur par les effets négatifs de la modernité: ses fondements s’écroulent, elle n’est plus capable de se tenir debout. Ce sont des foules urbaines qui ne font pas partie d’un soulèvement, d’une révolte ou d’une guerre civile : elles ont été produites par l’industrialisation, l’urbanisation, le processus de démocratisation politique et sociale. Elles sont liées étroitement aux métropoles, à la grande industrie et au tertiaire, au temps libre et à la disponibilité de petites sommes à dépenser au-delà des nécessités. Ce sont des foules “normales”, et c’est de la normalité, du progrès même, qui vient le danger. En fait, la foule est violente, irrationnelle, à l’unisson. L’individu qui en fait partie est englouti : avec les caractéristiques de l’individu (autonomie, raison, originalité, autocontrôle), la civilisation européenne disparaît. Mots-clés : foule, fin, peur, fin-de-siècle, Europe Nella fine secolo la folla fa paura per un motivo: essa può far cadere la società attuale nei paesi sviluppati. Siamo in Europa, alla fine del XIX secolo, più precisamente tra Francia e Italia. Gli autori che studiano la folla (sociologi, psicologi, biologi) pensano che la civiltà europea sia giunta alla fine. L’Europa è minacciata dai neo-barbari che compongono la folla e prosciugata all’interno dagli effetti negativi della modernità: i suoi fondamenti crollano, essa non è più capace di tenersi in piedi. Si tratta di folle urbane che non fanno parte di una ribellione, una rivolta o una guerra civile: sono state prodotte dall’industrializzazione, l’urbanizzazione, il processo di democratizzazione politica e sociale. Sono strettamente legate alle metropoli, alla grande industria e al terziario, al tempo libero e alla disponibilità di piccole somme da spendere al di là delle necessità. Sono folle “normali”, ed è dalla normalità, dal progresso stesso, che viene il pericolo. Di fatto, la folla è violenta, irrazionale, all’unisono. L’individuo che ne fa parte ne è inghiottito: insieme alle caratteristiche dell’individuo (autonomia, ragione, originalità, auto-controllo) scompare la civiltà europea. Parole chiave: folla, fine, paura, fine secolo, Europa
Where is the Decadent Suicide? Doherty, Ryan Atticus
Dix-neuf : journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes,
01/2023, Letnik:
27, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Although privileged in both classical and modern literature, suicide's role in the Decadent literature of the late nineteenth century remains an underexplored and fruitful topic. This article ...proposes a Decadent theory of self-destruction that decentres the physical act itself. Suicide, in Decadence, functions as a type of escapism, mobilising the idea of death without actually engaging with it. By exploring works of Decadent authors such in the French tradition, this article extrapolates a Decadent positionality to suicide; by casting decadence as indefinitely deferring the instantaneous into the eternal, suicide becomes an abstract horizon, rather than an existential threat.
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella The Golden Death (1914) commemorates Japan’s participation in the global circulation of fin de siècle decadence and Aestheticism. A close study of The Golden Death shows ...how the protagonist Okamura’s project of building his artificial paradise showcases a chaotic bricolage of European and Asian artefacts and literary masterpieces. Failing to emulate fin de siècle writers, the Japanese novella simultaneously reveals the author’s inability to formulate a clearly defined aesthetic belief through borrowing Western counterparts. This tragicomic story reflects Japan’s unsystematic reception of fin de siècle Decadent literature and Aestheticist discourses when the country’s literary circles were still under the strong influence of Naturalism.
Due to the rich and stylistically heterogeneous artistic creativity of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, his affinity towards various philosophical and religious narratives, as well as to his interest ...and accomplishments in the domain of poetry, the discourse created around the name and works of Scriabin has been abundant with exceptional diversity in artistic, critical and ideological context. Contemporary researchers, dealing with such often conflicting views on the art and worldview of Alexander Scriabin, are faced with numerous issues and doubts. In this paper, two questions are posed that need to be unravelled in order to finally demystify Scriabin: how and in what way did Scriabin, an apparently apolitical artist, participate in the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia and artists of the Silver Age to create a social utopia and to what did this composer owe a distinguished social status in his time? The answers to these questions lead to the conclusion that Scriabin was a reactionary, modernist figure, who, by representing his own conception of social transformation and future utopia, mediated between the idealist and materialist currents of the Russian intelligentsia.
