The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880-1900

About this book

The fin-de-sicle 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-sicle 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.