Search

This dissertation examines artworks by Adolphe Willette and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen in fin-de-siècle Montmartre, a neighborhood in Paris. Both artists were associated with the Chat Noir cabaret and its eponymous journal. They were hired to decorate the interior space of the cabaret with paintings and, in the case of Willette, stained glass. These were artworks that reflected and helped shape the environments inside spaces that cultivated avant-garde ideas about culture and politics. Following their work with the cabaret, both artists worked in the streets of Montmartre as well. Steinlen became a well-regarded poster artist and Willette created a parade to celebrate and raise money for the artists of Montmartre through moments of media experimentation that expanded their reach to more bigger publics. Through their bold use of media – large-scale paintings, lithographic prints, stained glass, and performance – Willette and Steinlen discovered new ways to reach audiences that eschewed traditional exhibition strategies. Through their works, they participated in dialogues that promoted their shared Bohemian ideologies of anti-capitalism, social justice, and anarchism. Both artists also imbued their work with historical references that aligned with their messaging. Willette turned to Medieval France for his brand of idyllic nationalistic nostalgia, and Steinlen looked to revolutionary history for his. Nostalgia, media, and democratic access will be key themes in a dissertation that illuminates a set of understudied works for and around the cabarets of Montmartre.

Many of today’s vocal techniques and ideas about vocality originate at the turn of the previous century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, science and aesthetics, theory and practice, the medical and the musical came together. Arthur Chervin exemplifies the nineteenth-century impulse toward blending theory and practice in his journal La Voix Parlée et Chantée, published from 1890 through the end of 1903 in Paris. From 1848 onward, doctors and medical practitioners in France began to infiltrate many aspects of politics, social life, and art. As an acknowledged expert in stuttering and a state-appointed physician and the Paris Opéra, Chervin was well positioned to facilitate a multi-disciplinary publication that merged medical perspectives with those of performers and pedagogues. His journal is unique in its interdisciplinarity and its wide-ranging arguments about vocal health and aesthetics. A close reading of La Voix enables an exploration of the many sociological, cultural, and artistic implications of voice, health, and pathology in 1890s France. In the early chapters of this dissertation, I show how physicians’ interventions into the bodies of ailing singers both constricted the timbres available for expressive singing and contributed to the idea that vocal anatomy determines vocal sound. And, moving beyond the physical, I investigate the relationship between mental interiority (sanity, trustworthiness, identity, etc.) and vocality, showing that contributors to La Voix believed they could evaluate an individual’s innermost feelings by listening to the sound of their voice. Later chapters examine pedagogies designed to shape children’s voices, and finally an exploration of timbral practices in three distinct groups of voice users—amateur choristers, professional orators, and singers/actors. Throughout, I synthesize contents from La Voix and other period sources, as well as from contemporary scholarship on vocality, contemplating how fin-de-siècle vocal norms continue to influence today’s classical singing practices.

This thesis conducts a feminist analysis of depictions of sex work in fin-de-siècle, or turn of the19th-century, French literature. It draws connections between literature from this time period and the social and political forces that sought to eradicate female sexual autonomy. In the introduction, the political and social setting of fin-de-siècle France is explored, when sex work was widely prevalent and for many women offered a route to sexual and financial autonomy that was otherwise unattainable, much to the anxiety and irritation of the patriarchal forces in place.The first chapter analyzes Emile Zola’s Nana as a classic representation of the patriarchal fin-de-siècle fear of and resulting attempt to conquer feminine sexuality via the stereotyped figure of the sex worker in literature. In contrast, chapters two and three offer feminist counter-discourses that deviate from the traditional fin-de-siècle depictions of sexuality and protest the superficial depictions of the sex worker. Liane de Pougey’s Idylle Saphique and Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus each offer more authentic and multi-faceted portrayals, effectively illuminating the existence of the sex worker who was so often silenced and spoken for. The concluding chapter compares this dichotomy between literature and feminine sexual autonomy of the past to the very same dynamic today in the criminalization and censorship of sex workers and the opposing sex worker activism and literature. Although literature can be a force of oppression, it can also be a medium for agency- and with forces of oppression always comes the counter-movements of the oppressed.

Abstract: Abstract This tome is both a “solar” dissertation and a “lunar” grimoire that performs its own argument. Adepts of Modernism argues that the infamous “little magazines” of modernism conjured their own enlightened, reading “counter-publics” by exploiting the same strategies and tactics of initiation and exclusion mobilized in occult circles. Figures from the literary and occult spheres from the Fin de Siècle and through the Great War converge in a network of adeptship. The magazines in this network disseminate knowledge from the occult “wisdom tradition” and share a common adept attitude that sets them apart from the public and the exoteric, mainstream media they consume. Chapter 1 analyzes The Little Review and shows how Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s editorial posture of insouciance reflects their initial commitment to both anarchism and esotericism, culminating in a thwarted mystical anarchism. A comparison of memoirs by Huntly Carter and Algernon Blackwood reveals how, for this magazine, poetry and spirituality go hand in hand. Chapter 2 focuses on co-editors of The Egoist, Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, along with Leonard A. Compton-Rickett, Richard Aldington, H. D., and Ezra Pound. These figures have a complex, ambivalent relationship with mysticism, but their common investment in individualism and an elitist, exclusive, classical modernism holds them together. Olivia Shakespear’s translation of the occult story, Le Comte de Gabalis, embodies these investments. Chapter 3 considers the distinct “presentative” style of The New Age magazine in relation to editor A. R. Orage’s mystical socialism. A series of articles by Florence Farr provides a feminist corrective to Orage’s masculinist “brilliant common sense.” This idiosyncratic, “Luciferian” socialism appeals to an audience of modernists, Fabians, and occultists alike, and its threads lead back to the great French magus, Eliphas Lévi. Chapter 4 examines Aleister Crowley’s Equinox in the context of modernist periodical culture. The Equinox is most committed to occult subjects and offers readers a course of study and a method of self-initiation. Esoteric literature, in the form of a magical diary and a short story, “The Dream Circean,” complements Crowley’s formal program of initiation and blurs the boundaries between objective and subjective ‘reality.’ Chapter 5 shows how Lucifer magazine, edited by H. P. Blavatsky and Mabel Collins, utilizes the same techniques of occult initiation replicated in the modernist little magazines that followed, thus revealing a continuity of esoteric editorial practice from the Fin de Siècle through the Great War. Blavatsky’s controversial “Luciferian” editorials and Collins’s serialized esoteric novella, “The Blossom and the Fruit,” exemplify the adept attitude that inspired subsequent generations of adept writers. Adepts of Modernism concludes with a personal reflection on occult pedagogy before outlining the legacy of these magical magazines and gesturing towards some new directions for future research.

Remarkable nineteenth-century characters, such as Verdi’s Violetta, Puccini’s Tosca, Strauss’s Salome, Bizet’s Carmen, among many others, inhabit our women imaginary in European concert music. However, in terms of creation, these representations of women in music—which we have come to learn, enjoy, and admire—do not emanate from women. We seldom ask: what about women characters written by women? In a male-dominated art, unsurprisingly, women are primarily represented through the unequivocal male-gaze, stereotyped by men and masculinist culture. In this dissertation, I focus on Augusta Holmès and Cécile Chaminade because, while they are contrasting composers, a history of generalized gender bias has held them both up as salon music writers and as the only two successful French women composers of the fin-de-siècle. In investigating such oversimplifications, I examine the gender bias that inhabits the concept of salon music. Further, my attention to musical representations of women by women unfolds into a quest to contextualize Holmès’s and Chaminade’s access to music education, networking, and performance venues, and their individual stories. Considering the political specificities of the fin-de-siècle, namely the encroachment on women’s rights, I establish a conversation between what women were ascribed to do in nineteenth-century France and what Holmès and Chaminade actually did. Analyzing Chaminade’s construction of women characters in Sombrero (1894) and Colette (1891), I observe her use of exoticism to portray a Spanish woman and argue her music had global reach. Likewise, I present a complex picture of Holmès’s allegories for The Republic and Andromeda as heroines of the nation in Ode triomphale (1889) and Andromède (1901), and I contend that Holmès’s nationalism and anti-Dreyfusism heavily inform her music, shedding great light onto her last symphonic poem, Andromède. With women at the center, nuanced narratives on music, past and present, emerge.

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature. By identifying trends in a large corpus of author-stories and analysing representative texts, I offer a theory which elucidates the forms and functions of author-stories and the characters within them. I argue that author-stories act as textual sites at which questions of literary value and cultural conceptions of the author and the novel are constantly negotiated and revised by authors. The dissertation focuses on the years between 1850 and 1950, a pivotal period in literary history during which authorship was becoming increasingly professionalised, and the novel was rapidly gaining the cultural and critical significance which culminated in its institutionalisation as a subject of university study, and in the founding of prestigious literary awards. I argue that author-stories rise to prominence during the second half of the nineteenth century, as novelists were attempting to frame their work as a profession deserving of legal rights and remuneration, but were also championing the novel’s moral, intellectual, and artistic qualities. The dominant narrative of late Victorian author-stories is a binary in which struggling and starving writers clash with the unscrupulous authors, editors, and publishers who produce shallow commercial fiction. During the reign of literary modernism, however, the dominant narrative shifts to focus on the individual author-as-Artist, now entirely aloof from the marketplace and the literary sphere. Attendant to this broader concern is a consideration of the way that gender becomes inextricably entangled with this dichotomy of commercial and artistic value. I explore the extent to which representations of female authorship which circulated around the turn of the twentieth century tended to affirm the association of women writers with the low-brow and the commercial, whilst representations of male authorship have frequently strengthened the pervasive view that men’s writing is the realm of high art. In doing so, the thesis highlights the fact that these dominant narratives and stereotypes do not go unchallenged, and that author-stories become a vital source for examining the methods by which cultural conceptions of the author and the novel have been created, consecrated and contested within the literary sphere.

This dissertation investigates the early twentieth-century works of three British women authors who concentrated on the crucial role of fin-de-si�cle culture in shaping modern womanhood. The writers in question are Lucas Malet (the pen name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison) (1852-1931), Netta Syrett (1865-1943), and Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957): three authors whose oeuvres, to varying degrees, remain on the margins of scholarship. Taken together, this body of fiction represents an overlooked enclave of women’s writing that refashions the English novel in order to forge new narratives for rebellious women characters. Malet, Syrett, and Richardson share a fascination with investigating the ways in which not only aestheticism (the late nineteenth-century cultural movement that championed “art for art’s sake”) but also decadence (the subsequent movement that flouted moral conventions) could provide them with resources for imagining new forms of modern femininity. Moreover, all three writers are in dialogue with the cultural and literary figure that stood for insubordinate womanhood at the fin de si�cle: the New Woman. This dissertation demonstrates the divergent ways in which Malet, Syrett, and Richardson critically engage with the audacious artistic and sexual advances that developed from aestheticism, decadence, and the New Woman, in order to affirm women’s dissident desires, autonomous self-fashioning, and professional ambitions.The present study reassesses a span of neglected novels that Malet, Syrett, and Richardson produced between 1896 and 1919. The three substantial chapters explore the works of each of these writers in turn. Existing scholarship about Malet, Syrett, and Richardson has tended to associate each author’s oeuvre with separate literary movements, and therefore critics have seldom considered these novelists’ works in relation to one another. Malet’s fictions are narrated in lush, evocative prose, and have proved to be of particular critical interest to students of literary aestheticism. By comparison, Syrett’s novels are narrated in a middlebrow realist style that has primarily been associated with New Woman fiction. Meanwhile, Richardson fashioned an innovative narrative technique that scholars associate with early developments in English modernism. By juxtaposing these authors, the present study enables us to recognize that these writers converge upon the idea that transgressive forms of womanhood emerged in the period most closely associated with aestheticism and decadence. This dissertation therefore offers an alternative to more traditional ways of grouping women’s fiction written between 1890 and 1920 according to more overt markers of style. Moreover, the history of decadence that I chart here runs counter to a pervasive understanding of the movement as one that was adverse to women, and it also diverges from the way in which certain male contemporaries such as Holbrook Jackson, Richard Le Gallienne, and Osbert Burdett, reflected in the 1910s and 1920s on decadence as having terminated at the turn of the century. This dissertation thus remaps a history of women’s writing, the form of the novel, and art for art’s sake after the turn of the twentieth century through a detailed consideration of several respective novels that Malet, Syrett, and Richardson produced during these decades.

Crying Shame: Childhood, Development, and Political Feeling in the Late Victorian Novel synthesizes recent work in childhood studies and affect theory to explain the role British literature played in promoting cultural formations of shame between 1870 and 1910. The fiction of the period in question has long been considered in terms of its promotion of transformative ideological formations about young people and about the “new imperialism.” But rather than seeing these phenomena as separate, my project contends that a common emotional orientation served as the most powerful force for binding the development of the individual to the development of the empire. The shame that adult readers experienced about their own children’s failure to attain various benchmarks let novelists draw uncomfortable parallels between future generations and “infantile,” “backward,” or “primitive” colonial subjects.The three novels that serve as case studies represent innovative assemblages of shame, constructions of childhood, and nationalistic and imperialistic imaginaries, brought together in narrative form for popular consumption. These narratives inevitably draw on the period’s voluminous and often contradictory prescriptions for ensuring proper maturation. Grounding each analysis in the multidisciplinary, debate-driven context that scaled individual development up to account for broader cultural dynamics, Crying Shame offers new insight into how authors enlisted new theories from fields as disparate as anthropology, economics, and psychology to represent individual minds, ethics, and power. It also suggests the period’s literature reciprocally critiqued contemporary adulthood in the context of imperial management. The shame-inducing pressures to promote now characteristic cultural components of “normal” childhood – education over labor (Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm), compulsory play (Rudyard Kipling’s Kim), and attention to language acquisition (Henry James’s What Maisie Knew) – raised uncomfortable questions about extending similar luxuries differentially to colonial subjects only ambivalently seen as British.By reconstructing a history of cultural assumptions about children’s relationships to the political process, to human rights, to imperialism, and to innocence, Crying Shame offers new models for conceptualizing the role emotions play in public spheres, institutions, and literary representation. In demanding what is really at stake when we ask people to “think of the children,” it offers an origin for a political appeal that remains viable even in supposedly rational twenty-first century discourse.

This dissertation examines the popular culture and visual material connected to the Dreyfus Affair in nineteenth century France. The Dreyfus Affair was an important political and social event that took place in the 1890s in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was wrongfully accused of treason and found guilty, despite a lack of evidence. In the aftermath of the verdict, French society split into opposing camps, largely based on social and political values. Newspapers and journals covered the Dreyfus Affair prolifically and a broad variety of materials were produced that related to the Affair, such as postcards, posters, novelties, and games. It is through these items that the public really engaged with the Affair, an aspect of it that has largely been overlooked. This dissertation posits that the material produced contained a variety of functions for the public, from didacticism to entertainment. An overview of common subjects and themes is discussed to provide a general framework before the more lengthy discussion of the materials possible functions. Also explored are the concepts of low-brow and high-brow material, especially as it connects to the figure of the collector.

By exploring his collaborations with the Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, comparing their paintings while working together, and re-examining Emile Bernard's work, this thesis will attempt to assert that : 1) Bernard's ideas and artwork foreshadowed important elements in the mature styles of both van Gogh and Gauguin, influencing each. 2) The symbolic importance of Bernard's paintings (Breton Women in a Meadow and The Buckwheat Harvest in particular) has been underestimated. And 3) Bernard's status amongst the pantheon of early modern painters should be reevaluated.

Spanish travel writings on China at the end of the 19th century have been largely ignored in the history of literature. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a thorough examination since these texts constitute a particular and important vision of an "Orientalized" country about an Oriental nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. On one hand, Spain was characterized by an irreversible decadence. Thus, in contrast to British and French imperial discourse, which reflects colonial experiences, Spanish travel writings provide a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Furthermore, although China was a goal of imperial ambition, it was far less colonized than other regions. As a result, the commanding imperial gaze and fearless exploration were less likely to be cast on China. In addition, despite its general decline, China remained the home of an ancient and highly advanced civilization that still deserved Western respect and offered the West much to learn. Considering these facts, this dissertation consists of a general analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to portray the bibliographic genealogy of references on Spanish travelers and their writings on China during this period; to depict their particular vision in which the construct of colonial discourse is transformed into a pretension to recover the lost imperial prestige and an interiorized reflection on Spain's own problems and possible solutions; and to present a fundamental ambivalence or even difficult conciliation between the colonial discourse and its resistance, ideology and utopia, as well as imperialist ambition and national crisis. Spanish travel writings on China consequently become an allegory of imperial nostalgia: a yearning for the imperial power that had vanished, without hope of restoration.

Abstract: Grounded in the methodologies of New Historicism, New Criticism, Subaltern Studies, and Colonial Discourse Analysis, this dissertation explores Englishwomen’s fictions of the nautch girl (or Indian dancing girl) at the turn of the century. Writing between 1880 to 1920, and within the context of the women’s movement, a cluster of British female writers—such as Flora Annie Steel, Bithia Mary Croker, Alice Perrin, Fanny Emily Penny and Ida Alexa Ross Wylie—communicate both a fear of and an attraction towards two interconnected, long-enduring communities of Indian female performers: the tawaifs (Muslim courtesans of Northern India) and the devadasis (Hindu temple dancers of Southern India). More specifically, the authors grapple with the recognition that these anomalous Indian women have liberties (political, financial, social, and sexual) that British women do not. This recognition significantly undermines the imperial feminist rhetoric circulating at the time that positioned British women as the most emancipated females in the world and as the natural leaders of the international women’s movement. The body chapters explore the various ways in which these fictional devadasis or tawaifs test imperial feminism, starting with their threat to the Memsahib’s imperial role in the Anglo-Indian home in the first chapter, their seduction of burdened Anglo-Indian domestic women in the second chapter, their terrorization of the British female adventuress in the third chapter, and ending with their appeal to fin-de-siècle dancers searching for a modern femininity in the final chapter. My project is urgent at a time when imperial feminism is becoming the dominant narrative by which we are being trained to read encounters between British and Indian women, at the expense of uncovering alternative readings. I conclude the dissertation by suggesting that the recovery of these alternative readings can be the starting point for rethinking the hierarchies and the boundaries separating First World from Third World feminisms today.

My dissertation explores the intersection of art and politics in the career of 19th-century French designer Émile Gallé. It is commonly recognized that in fin-de-siècle France, works such as commemorative statues and large-scale history paintings played a central role in the creation of a national mythology. What has been overlooked, however, is the vital role that 19th-century arts reformers attributed to material culture in the process of forming national subjects. By educating the public's taste and promoting Republican values, many believed that the decorative arts could serve as a powerful tool with which to forge the bonds of nationhood. Gallé's works in glass and wood are the product of the artist's lifelong struggle to conceptualize just such a public role for his art. By studying decorative art objects and contemporary art criticism, then, I examine the ways in which Gallé's works actively participated in contemporary efforts to define a unified national identity and a modern artistic style for France. My study begins with an examination of Gallé's works produced for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, works that focused on forging consensus among members of the French nation through their appeal to patriotic values. I argue that the divisive events of the Dreyfus Affair, however, led Gallé to reevaluate the idea of both artistic and political consent. In response to these challenges, Gallé developed a Symbolist style that privileged subjective sensation as an expression of the artist's political commitment to the rights of the individual. I contend that Gallé's encounter with Japanese art, meanwhile, informed his decision to abandon conventional forms of allegory in favor of defining the national through the natural. My dissertation concludes with a discussion of Gallé's role as the founder of the École de Nancy, a group that brought together artists and industrialists in an attempt to reformulate ideas of artistic community and national identity in the wake of the Affair. In his works, then, I argue that Gallé sought to redefine what it meant to be French and, in the process, transformed the way in which his contemporaries viewed the decorative arts and their cultural significance.

This study explores six utopias by female authors written at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora (1881), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant's Unveiling Parallel (1893), Eloise O. Richberg's Reinstern (1900), Lena J. Fry's Other Worlds (1905), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), and Martha Bensley Bruère's Mildred Carver, USA (1919). While the right to vote had become the central, most important point of the movement, women were concerned with many other issues affecting their lives. Positioned within the context of the late nineteenth century women's rights movement, this study examines these "sideline" concerns of the movement such as home and gender-determined spheres, motherhood, work, marriage, independence, and self-sufficiency and relates them to the transforming character of female identity at the time. The study focuses primarily on analyzing the expression of female historical desire through utopian genre and on explicating the contradictory nature of utopian production.

Scholarship on the life of the composer Gustav Holst has been dominated by the writings of his daughter Imogen, which are increasingly in dispute in light of fresh data and interpretation. The present dissertation offers a fresh view of Gustav Holst’s life in this respect, in relation to two important elements of his cultural environment: British Imperialism, and the music of Richard Wagner. The first section of the dissertation considers the role of Imperialism in Holst’s formative years in Cheltenham, as well as illustrating his portrayal of the East as both inferior and “other” to the West in King Estmere (1903) and Beni Mora (1910). This demonstrates that Holst’s view of the East was multifaceted and not simply the reverent approach found in Sanskrit inspired works such as Savitri (1908) and The Cloud Messenger (1912). The second section of the dissertation examines the development of Holst’s personal music idiom through his dynamic relationship with the music of Richard Wagner. Holst’s three operas, Sita (1899-1906), Savitri, and The Perfect Fool (1908-1923), illustrate his progression from emulation, to personalization, and finally to parody of Wagner, questioning received interpretations that Wagner was detrimental to Holst’s development. The consideration of Holst and his music in this way highlights the many questions that characterize our understanding of his life and music, and contributes to the ongoing process of reconnecting Holst to the culture in which he lived.

This dissertation analyzes melancholia as a theme and narrative technique in Swedish and Austrian writings at the fin de siecle. Focusing on August Strindberg's A Madman's Defense (1887/88), Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Das Marchen der 672. Nacht (1895), Arthur Schnitzler's Casanovas Heimfahrt (1917), and Otto Weininger's Geschlecht and Charakter (1903), I argue that crises of masculinity evolve in these texts through expressions of loss and longing, i.e., symptoms of melancholia. While crises of masculinity have often been studied separately in both the Austrian fin de siecle and August Strindberg's works (addressing masochistic tendencies in the former and aggressive tones in the latter texts), I show that the figure of melancholia reveals structural and thematic similarities between these writings. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's Trauer und Melancholie, I contend that melancholia is a reaction to the loss of an ambivalently cathected object, which results in the subject's need for self-accusation. Melancholic mourning always reveals more about the melancholic subject than about the lost object because of the subject's attempts to overcome his or her sense of fragmentation. Furthermore, melancholia becomes a narrating device, which I demonstrate by means of Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory as the correlate of melancholia. Allegories refer only to themselves because they cannot completely capture any object in the real world, and thus manifest a verbally rich surface that disguises its self-referentiality. Melancholia is felt as lost love in Strindberg's A Madman's Defense , while it characterizes the structure of narration in Hofmannsthal's Marchen. Schnitzler's Casanova story reveals the dead-end character of melancholic repetitions through irony which accepts rather than mourns the fragmentation of the subject. Finally, Otto Weininger's monograph Geschlecht und Charakter becomes melancholic in spite of itself, repetitively seeking to solve the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity as a problem of lost morality. Melancholia and masculinity form a pair in these texts, revealing that melancholic longing is integral to modern man in his attempt to come to terms with the fragmentation of his self.