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The turn of the twentieth century in Finland saw an increasing number of popular articles and books on health, which were published within the broader framework of 'social hygiene' and aimed at children, young people and their families. This article examines how young people articulated concerns about their own mental health in the context of these campaigns to improve social hygiene. Based on an extensive body of original sources consisting of medical advisory material and letters written by the young, the study reveals how young people saw themselves in this health context—especially when writing about their 'nerves' or 'nervousness'. Drawing on more recent methodological investigations in the history of childhood, this study adds the much-needed perspective of the young people themselves as subjects experiencing these problems, to counterbalance the otherwise exclusively expert discourses on the subject of mental hygiene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H. G. Wells's serial fable The Sea Lady (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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Using the example of the fin‐de‐siècle German Reich, this article outlines how insomnia emerged as a "disease of civilisation" in an industrialising society, defined by time‐specific notions, reflecting and strengthening the social norms of the time. Furthermore, it analyses the process of individualisation and flexibilisation that transferred the social struggles and economic demands of modernity onto the subject's body or soul. The history of insomnia around 1900 thus reveals a pattern of thought that shaped the understanding of the insomniac throughout the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative study of the underlying cognitive structures laid out in Arthur Machen's decadent novella The Great God Pan (1894) and Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" (1873). It scrutinizes the images of the "chamber of consciousness" and "the house of life", deployed by the German philosopher and the Welsh author respectively, and explores how the use and the stylistic qualities of both images affect and determine the overall conception of reality exposed in each work. This analysis helps identify Nietzschean undertones in Machen's novella, which, in turn, allows an interpretation of The Great God Pan through the lens of Nietzsche's discourses on cognition and reality. The reading resulting from the analysis puts forward two conclusions. Firstly, Nietzsche's concept of "Dionysian wisdom" brings to light and informs a specific and yet unexplored source of horror in Machen's novella, i.e., the feeling of revulsion developed by Helen Vaughn's victims after they experience Dionysian rapture. Secondly, the analysis of the concepts of reality implied in Nietzsche's and Machen's imagery contributes an argument for the idea of reality as becoming in the context of Machen's novella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from being a mere rebuttal against romanticized views of the Middle Ages, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court engages constructively with the medievalist milieu of the late-Victorian fin-de-siècle. Twain depicts sixth-century England as a time of squalor, but he extends a level of appreciation to the selflessness of King Arthur. Framing time-traveling rabble-rouser Hank Morgan as a symbol of both Enlightenment reformism and self-aggrandizing authoritarianism that justifies wanton violence through abstract claims of societal progress, Twain is as critical of industrial commercialism as of medieval feudalism. This article argues Twain engages with the same questions as the more overtly medievalist writers of the fin-de-siècle, specifically William Morris. While Morris was more laudatory toward the medieval period, this article asserts they both staunchly criticized the solipsism and obsession with technology they believed defined the industrial age without desiring merely to re-create the hierarchies of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios is the property of Impossibilia: Revista Internacional de Estudios Literarios and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the late 1890s, chemists devised industrial processes to manufacture milk protein powders, now a major fitness food category. These peculiar and flavorless inventions were made from skimmed milk waste from modernised dairies. This paper explores why manufacturers made them and why the British ate them, by examining what commentators and eaters wrote and read about them. The two leading brands were near-identical materially, but became understood differently. Purportedly, Plasmon was a scientifically-advanced proteinaceous muscularizing product while Sanatogen was a phosphorated nerve supplement which imbued intellect and willpower. Their positionings were shaped by the myth-making power of advertising, amplified by the power of celebrity testimonies and the authority of scientific experts, and tempered by press and consumer' reactions. Scientific knowledge was used reductively, and was shaped by cultural values. Consumers were complicit in this framing: the technification of these white powders provided mechanisms for self-improvement. Consumers simply needed to swallow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Essays in French Literature & Culture is the property of University of Western Australia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As the foremost organ of the French satirical and illustrated press, the weekly Le Rire captivated a broad reading public in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the crossroads of commercial entertainment and mass media, Le Rire sought to champion caricature and comic illustration as art forms worthy of serious merit and to make humor a powerful tool for political, cultural, and social commentary. This article aims to assess the periodical's impact in its time, and furthermore, contends that Le Rire was a determinative force in reshaping public mores toward comedy and satire, carrying the legacy of nineteenth-century developments in the history of French caricature into novel modes of expression and consumption at the turn of the twentieth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Anales de Filología Francesa is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After the first death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, both Arthur Conan Doyle and L. T. Meade turned to the medical short story in order to fill the gap in the popular market. While Meade's series in The Strand (1893–96), in collaboration with Dr Clifford Halifax, were extremely popular and created a new, sub-genre of detective fiction, Doyle's stories, published in Round theRed Lamp (1894) were not well-received. The irony in this comes from the fact that Meade managed to adapt the Sherlock Holmes formula to medical fiction, while Doyle did not learn from his own success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Encompassing the final decades of Habsburg rule and the rise of modern culture, the cosmopolitan and Jewish Vienna of the fin de siècle was a despised locus in the Nazi historical imaginary. Vienna 1900 was a polyglot, multicultural city, a place where European Jewry had risen to unforeseen heights of economic prosperity and cultural influence; many Nazi ideologues, historians, and authors focused on the verjudet nature of late imperial Vienna. A variety of strategies were employed to distance the Nazi present from Vienna 1900; it was alternately suppressed and ignored, or deeply vilified. Yet the period was also inseparable from two figures celebrated in Nazi Vienna: Mayor Karl Lueger and artist Gustav Klimt. This article examines Nazi discourse on Vienna 1900, especially that originating from Viennese writers, ideologues, and political figures. Reflecting both scholarly and popular views, I examine academic texts, books for popular readers, films, and art exhibitions. After examining the perception and appropriation of Vienna 1900 between the years 1938 and 1945, I end by exploring its instrumentalization in a different context. In an ironic twist of history, the very period suppressed and derided in Nazi discourse would in turn be called upon, by the 1970s, to distract from the shadow of the Nazi era that still hung over the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nottingham French Studies is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Encounters in Theory & History of Education / Rencontres en Theorie et Histoire de l'Educacion is the property of Queen's University, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present paper makes use of Michel Foucault's theory from Discipline and Punish according to which one of the means by which women's bodies are controlled is through their hystericization by the power-knowledge-wielding medical profession. Taking Stoker's famous novel as a case in point, I mean to show that the men of the novel, embodiments of Reason and Empire, gathered around the guiding medical intelligence of professor Van Helsing, act upon the bodies of the vampirized women (Lucy and Mina) in a way that is the metaphorical expression of the symbolic violence perpretated against women socially. Thus, the novel is gothic in more ways than one: its much-discussed portrayal of sexually-liberated femininity through vampirization finds its counterpart in the less-approached medical masculinity, a reinforcer of masculine domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent cosmopolitan work, scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, and Ulrich Beck have represented the stranger as a universal ideal for our global age and Georg Simmel's stranger in the Exkurs über den Fremden has been emphasized as a model for this ideal. While these uses can be justified by generalized passages in Simmel's essay, they still omit the problem of European Jewish historical exemplarity. Thus, in the decades before Simmel's essay, this stranger type was already a well-developed figure related to the so-called Jewish question. Georg Brandes and Henrik Pontoppidan used the Jewish stranger to evaluate the societal changes of the fin-de-siècle period and questions of progress vs. decay. Yet, their work limited the stranger to a specific type of Jewishness not including other marginal existences. Hence, reading Simmel with Brandes and Pontoppidan outlines the boundaries of this stranger type as it raises questions regarding recent cosmopolitan uses of Simmel's stranger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Oceánide is the property of Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture (SELICUP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

"The world is my home." With these five words Oscar Wilde succinctly defined his fin-de-siecle cosmopolitanism. As an intriguing example of this cosmopolitanism, The Picture of Dorian Gray celebrates an aesthetic detached from locality and morality, and criticizes contemporaneous British Philistinism. By translating and rewriting Dorian Gray as Du Liankui (tt^SM), Taiwanese architect-novelist Wang Dahong transformed the Wildean fin-de-si Scle aesthetic cosmopolitanism, replacing it with his own cosmopolitan and metropolitan visions. Wang's manipulative modification of the novel's tempo-spatial settings serves as a key to this transformation: Wilde's focus on the London-Paris relationship in the source text is ingeniously rendered into Taipei's relationships with other cities, including New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Paris. Wang's rewriting can be seen as the product of a kind of global imagination emphasizing the superiority of cosmopolitan urban aesthetics, its main tenet being that Taiwanese provincialism should be replaced by an openness, a desire to learn from other cultures. Though Wilde's aesthetic cosmopolitanism is lost in the process of Wang's rewriting, the translation gives us what the original novel could not have possibly provided-an urban cosmopolitanism which predicts the problems of today's Taipei. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the most significant semantic changes and transpositions that can be found in Zenon Przesmycki's translation of the seminal sonnet Langueur written by Paul Verlaine in the second half of the nineteenth century. It closely analyzes the way in which the translation was used by Polish scholars of literary history. Having influenced the vision of culture nurtured by the so-called Decadent Movement in fin-de-siècle Europe, Verlaine's poem was then employed in numerous academic studies as an illustration of the philosophy and the attitude towards society that were dominant in the period under discussion. In Poland, Przesmycki's translation played an important role in defining the very term "decadent," as several influential researchers used it in their analyses in order to provide their readers with Polish equivalents of the original French terms. As a result, Przesmycki's version of Verlaine's sonnet, although intended just as a poetic translation, served a different purpose from the ones that its translator could have ever imagined. It helped define and describe the culture of "decadent" Europe as a whole. The terminology Przesmycki used to translate the French words, such as langueur and decadence ("niemoc" and "wielkie konanie" respectively), was thus introduced into the Polish scholarly debate on European modernism. Premised upon the idea of cultural transfer (transfert culturel), the analysis presented in the article helps determine the extent to which Przesmycki's translation shaped the Polish perception of fin-de-siècle Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Carnets: Revue Electronique d'Etudes Françaises / Revista Electrónica de Estudos Franceses is the property of Associacao Portuguesa de Estudos Franceses (APEF) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Anagnórisis: Revista de Investigación Teatral is the property of Anagnorisis: Revista de Investigacion Teatral and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The parallel urge of introspection and meditation which comes with the evocation of silence acts as landmark for a whole current of fin de siecle literature. The symbolist era gives the impression that its actors were obsessed with silence. Symbolist poetry took possession of silence as a way to encapsulate the ineffability of feelings and the various states of mind it explored, leaning towards an aesthetical mysticism. Yet that tendency soon turned into a form of cliché that opened a path towards parody, silence becoming a stigma of the ideological shortcomings of symbolism in the eye of its detractors. The attempt to seize the silence led to a harsh confrontation with void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Published in 1889 and set infin-de-siècleBrussels, Marguerite Coppin'sRessort casséis the story of a cultivated, well-educated young woman and her eventual social exclusion. After attending an innovative secular school visibly modelled after Isabelle Gatti de Gamond's ‘Cours d’Éducation pour jeunes filles,’ protagonist Renée Michelli is unable to find her place in the gendered spheres of society. Her subsequent lifestyle of sexual predation and aggression recalls characteristics typical of the Decadentfemme fatale. However, with its attention to girls’ education reform and female intellectual subjectivity, Coppin's novel rewrites and parodies Decadent anxieties about malevolent femininity and the female mind. Through an emphasis on Renée's critical capacities as a reader and satirical intertextual references to the pathologized figure of the woman reader, the text raises questions about Gatti's programme, pedagogical philosophy and the place for women's intellect in both society and Decadent fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

George Du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Trilby (1894), is as important because of its defiance of social and cultural norms as it is for its apparent compliance with them. Trilby is a fiction that, like its eponymous heroine, attempts to negotiate the perilously fine line between the highbrow and the lowbrow, or to put it another way, between fine art and political commentary on one side, and pornography and sensationalism on the other. This article examines the way that Du Maurier engages his readership in this textual tease – his seduction of the reader – by suggesting the possibility of a peep show where everything that Victorian respectability abhors may be on display, and then his narratological dressing of the text, to ensure that where there is sexual non-conformity there is also moralism, and where there is social confrontation there is also historical distance. Understanding the textual appeal of Trilby as a character, the artist’s model who enchanted the fin-de-siècle reading public, is essential to appreciating how the discourses of pornography and fine art interact and have consequently evolved. This article therefore examines why Trilby succeeded with the Victorians where other, similarly sexually active heroines – such as Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead – failed. Trilby the novel and Trilby the woman are both broken down by their author into manageable parts, a pornographic fetishistic technique that simultaneously eroticises, and makes more palatable, the textual and the physical bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1896) as a major contribution to fin-de-siècle Gothic culture. Cymbeline (1896) was one of the most popular Victorian Shakespeare productions, running to wild acclaim for more than seventy-two performances. In Cymbeline’s sexually-charged bedroom scene, Imogen, played by beloved Victorian actress Ellen Terry, was preyed upon by Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo. Terry and Irving were at the zenith of a twenty-year partnership at London’s Lyceum theatre, and Victorian Britain’s greatest star actors. Ellen Terry’s Imogen became an ideally desirable heroine for both audiences and critics of Victorian Shakespeare. Simultaneously, Cymbeline, and the acclaimed performances of Terry and Irving, became a source for literature’s most famous Gothic vampire novel: Dracula, published by Bram Stoker in 1897. Bram Stoker was Henry Irving’s business manager, and intimately involved with Irving and Terry’s professional lives at the Lyceum theatre. This article reveals the relationship between Shakespeare and Dracula, especially Ellen Terry’s Imogen as an inspiration for Lucy Westenra. Textual evidence includes Terry’s correspondence and unpublished promptbooks, as well as Stoker’s biography of Henry Irving, and facsimile notes on Dracula. Examining Cymbeline (1896) and Dracula (1897) offers a new reading of Dracula, given Cymbeline’s obsession with liminal states and female vulnerability. Moreover, Victorian responses to Ellen Terry’s Imogen in the bedchamber scene highlight fin-de-siècle eroticisations of the sleeping woman, and Victorian fantasies of sexual access to the actress. Examining Terry’s reception illuminates the disjunction between performed female passivity as Imogen, and the professional, creative activity that underlined Terry’s stage practice and agency as a Victorian actress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the fantastic short-story as it appears in Brazilian Regionalism, attempting at an explanation of this little studied phenomenon. It argues that the Regional fantastic, a mode in- -between the uncanny and the marvelous, may correspond to an ambiguous feeling of an intellectual torn between an imposed urban modernity and the archaic mind of most of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Soletras is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Doxa Comunicación is the property of Fundacion Universitaria San Pablo - CEU and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The attentive focus required to play the game of whist famously led Poe to crown it the best indicator of an analytical, reasoning mind. Yet in Jules Lermina's 1885 story 'Les Fous', the game's logic takes on a lunatic rhythm, as the protagonist's tics and trances lead to the tale's brutal conclusion of murder in an insane asylum. This paper situates 'Les Fous' within three contexts: (i) historical and literary representations of card-playing from early nineteenth-century France, when ludic risk was linked to changing political regimes, to the fin-de-siècle, when many writers shifted their gaze from politics to psychopathology; (ii) the fin-de-siècle fantastic fictions of Maupassant and Villiers, which explore the thin edge between scientific rationality and mad solipsism in a positivistic age; and (iii) a broader crisis of perception, articulated in Jonathan Crary's Suspensions of Perception, in which the sustained attentiveness that allows productive citizens to engage in repetitive, machine-like tasks threatens coherent subjectivity in an industrial age. Poe and Lermina situate the thinking subject in the slippage between mechanistic regularity and murderous folly - between productive, time-bound citizenship and the clockwork automatism of hypnotics and hysterics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses recent developments in environmental criticism to analyse the role of the ‘The Strand Magazine’ and the late-Victorian periodical in general within late-century and early Edwardian London. It examines ‘The Strand’'s connection with the development of intra-city rail services, the simultaneous growth of the commuter belt and inner-city slums, and, finally, the ways in which the corporeal afterlife of periodical texts should alter traditional ways of interpreting them. It argues that, outside of periodical studies itself, the periodical has been neglected and not subjected to newer kinds of theoretical analysis. Contrary to popular prejudices against them, I argue that the periodical is a quintessentially environmental form in that it necessarily maintains a close, symbiotic relationship with the world around it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Quality of Life (1018-0389) / Calitatea Vietii is the property of Romanian Academy Publishing House / Editura Academiei Romane and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This interdisciplinary article explores the early history of heliotherapy (natural sunlight therapy) on the Côte d'Azur through its visual culture. It concentrates on images, and the texts within which they appear, of children undergoing heliotherapy dating to the First World War, as a way into examining the significance of the cure during a period of perceived national degeneration. By doing so, the article critically contextualises held notions of the region's reputation for hedonism, glamour and novelty. It argues that certain themes and strategies employed by practitioners to promote heliotherapy on the Côte d'Azur explain how the cure became naturalised and embedded into the region's raison d'être as a sunny playground. Through the visual material, the article concentrates on three themes: its primitive roots in cults and sun-worship; its ability to produce euphoria in the patient; and its use as a regenerative practice for French citizens, especially pre-tubercular or tubercular children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Filozofija i Drustvo is the property of University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy & Social Theory and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite strong statist and societal headwinds in late 19th and early 20th century, the anarchist movement in Switzerland persisted and for both seasoned and new activists, it remained an inviting and attractive movement to engage in. This paper brings to attention, that the permanent (re)constitution of collective identity played an integral part herein. As I shall contend, collective identity's dualistic character of simultaneous preservation and maintenance on one hand and of progress and development on the other, was key to the preservation of anarchism as a social movement in Switzerland. The analysis of 23 anarchist newspapers published between 1885 and 1914 in Switzerland in French and German discloses construction, use and embodiment of anarchist collective identity that are to be presented and discussed. In conclusion, light shall be shed on collective identity's role as a key motivational factor for social movements that focus on abstracta rather than on realia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at Arthur Machen’s baffling but defining work The Great God Pan from a completely new angle. Contrary to the text’s conspicuously pagan character, the essay argues that there is a calculated Judeo-Christian scheme beneath the surface. With the detection of this scheme, the peculiarities of Machen’s narrative make sense. By making intertextual connections and comparisons, and utilizing psychoanalytic ideas, the essay argues that the main character, Helen Vaughan, is the (re)incarnation of both an antichrist and Lilith. By employing a sophisticated esoteric narrative, the text updates the Judeo-Christian myth to fin-de-siècle London. The analysis attempts to illuminate the workings of Machen’s esoteric narration, observe its effects, and comprehend its purpose. It argues that the Judeo-Christian scheme in disguise is not only a proof of Machen’s personal theory of literature, but it is also chaotic and personal: Machen’s mystical vision and narrative obscurantism involves recombination, integration, and manipulation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“De zwarte kost” can mean either “the black meal” or “the black cost”. Of these two metaphors of consumption, one refers to sexual relations between white men and black women, the other to the deaths of Africans under Leopold's regime in the Congo Free State. The standard view of Buysse's text as “anti-colonial” seems anachronistic and reductive. I read it as a narrative about the practice of framing the Congo Free State itself, and about the reception and production of these frames by Flemish people. Presenting us with a mise-en-abyme of framing practices, the novella is primarily a critique of the closed-off provincialism of the Flemish villagers, and their ignorance of how the Congo had, by the late 1890s, increasingly become a Question beyond the village, indeed right across Europe. The validity of this reading is supported by Buysse's contemporary polemical essays on the Flemish movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the decades before 1914, nationalism pervaded cultural discourse more than ever before as a new type of subjectivist, organic nationalism came to the fore. At the same time nations were seen as consisting of a harmonious whole of organically grown regional folk cultures. Thus, a new more activist nationalism coincided and overlapped with the rise of a more folkloristic and regionalist interpretation of the respective national identities. But how did this affect the arts? Paintings by highly relevant fin-de-siècle artists such as Simon and Cottet in France, Bantzer and Mackensen in Germany and Zuloaga in Spain could be seen as interpretations of a specific national or regional 'soul'. A detailed, comparative analysis of the reviews of their work in the major art magazines of the period shows that their paintings skilfully translated the new, more activist and popular nationalist ideology into art, using similar arguments and rhetorical devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts something of the history of the lesbian world of Paris at the fin de siecle. It tells of the public visibility of lesbian women and the recognition of their place in Paris society whether in the salons of the upper crust, in the theatre, or in the brothels. It touches on the idea of Paris as a city where multiple and transgressive identities played within an unstable ambience where all was masks and mirrors, and little was what it seemed; this itself contributed to the concept of Paris both as a place of decadence and a place of tolerance: “gay Paree.” It also leaves open how and why “Paris Lesbos” disappeared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A craze for the skirt dance and for skirt dancing swept across the stages and dance floors and into the drawing rooms and schoolrooms of Europe and the United States of America during the 1890s. Individual skirt dance performers attracted mass fan bases and international celebrity status. The style became a characteristic of variety theatre programmes and was written into plays, musical comedies, pantomimes, skits and burlesques. Skirt dance lessons, instruction manuals and clothing brought the form into the class room and the domestic space. Fluctuating ideas concerning embodiment, gender and theatricality were embedded in each diverse, ephemeral performance of the skirt dance at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the proposition of a hygienic reform concerning the lifestyle of French people by doctors during a period called the Belle Époque, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of World War I, in reaction to industrial and urban development and its effect on health. According to the article, naturopathy enthusiasts and vegetarians agreed with this program and shared the idea that a lifestyle far from the laws of nature was the main cause of diseases. The Société Végétarienne de France, the French society of vegetarianism, is mentioned as a key player in the promotion of this reform.

Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations for the original English translation of Oscar Wilde's Salome (1894) are regarded by many critics as representing the illustrator's commentary on the playwright's relation to his play – although opinion is divided as to whether this commentary comprises an audacious lampoon of the author or a sophisticated appreciation of the drama. What is the nature of Beardsley's commentary on the relation between author and text? This essay argues that there is a 'queer disproportion' in Beardsley's illustrations which has hitherto been ignored in critical commentary on the play. This reading of Salome finds the space between an understanding of Wilde's writing practice as primarily invested in self-revelatory queer signification and persuasive arguments that his writings were largely informed by the unromantic and homogenizing pressures of the literary and theatrical marketplace in which Wilde struggled to establish himself as a successful professional writer. It focuses also on an understanding of the play in performance, through which the play's hidden history of homosexuality becomes tangible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The short surviving film of Herbert Beerbohm Tree acting Shakespeare's King John derives from a production of the play which was thoughtful and politically ambivalent. This essay seeks to explain the contexts and import of this production so that its meanings, as referenced in the short surviving filmic quotation from the stage production, may be better understood. Tree's interpretation of the Shakespeare play reflects the latest Victorian criticism, including a hitherto unnoticed article which appears to be a direct source for many of the ideas in the production. Centring the production on the moral decline of the King himself, Tree staged a parable of gothic decadence whose atmosphere also infiltrates the short film. Fin-de-siècle anxieties are at least as important in the production as the imperialist pre-Boer War aggression critics have discerned; the play's first night failed to provoke anti-Boer demonstrations and a number of reviewers took home an altogether more cautious and sombre message. A further set of anxieties revolved around antisemitism. The Dreyfus affair was a running sore in France, and the immense popularity of Scott's Ivanhoe had ensured that the reign of King John was profoundly associated with antisemitism in the Victorian mind; a couple of reviewers noted the relevance of Tree's production to this problem, with its emphasis on the liberal values of Magna Carta and its portrayal of a noble leader falling into persecution and tyranny. This essay seeks to enrich a reading of the surviving King John film through a consideration of the various sociopolitical anxieties and references encoded in the stage production it quotes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, Katherine Mansfield is well known as one of the most exciting and cutting-edge exponents of the modernist short story. Little critical attention, however, has been paid to her poetry, which seems a strange omission, given how much verse she wrote during the course of her life, starting as a very young schoolgirl, right up until the last months prior to her death in 1923. Even Mansfield devotees are not really familiar with any poems beyond the five or six that have most frequently been anthologised since her death, and few editions of her poetry have ever been published. Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, edited a slim volume, Poems, in 1923, within a few months of her death, followed by a slightly extended edition in 1930, and Vincent O'Sullivan edited another small selection, also titled Poems, in 1988. Unsurprisingly, therefore, critics and biographers have paid little attention to her poetry, tending to imply that it is a minor feature of her art, both in quantity and, more damagingly, in quality. This situation was addressed in 2016, when EUP published a complete and fully annotated edition of Mansfield's poems, edited by myself and Claire Davison, incorporating all my recent manuscript discoveries, including a collection of 36 poems—The Earth Child—sent unsuccessfully by Mansfield to a London publisher in 1910. This discovery in 2015 revealed how, at the very moment when Mansfield was starting to have stories accepted for commercial publication, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. Indeed, had the collection been published, perhaps Mansfield might now be celebrated as much for her poetry as for her short stories. Therefore, this article explores the development of Mansfield's poetic writing throughout her life and makes the case for her reassessment as an innovative poet and not just as a ground-breaking short story writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]