Visar resultat för...""Fin siècle""

Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy, Jewish Women in Fin de SiÈcle Vienna explores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres. Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images. As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population, Jewish Women in Fin de SiÈcle Vienna applies the lens of gender in important new ways.

Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905) is one of Finland's most beloved artists. He also gained early recognition on the international art scene and travelled frequently between the Nordic countries and Paris, something that is reflected in his art. Authors: Marina Catani, Eva Nygårds, Anne-Maria Pennonen, Hanne Selkokari, Patrik Steorn and Maria Vainio-Kurtkakko.

It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siècle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siècle.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The period covers the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the ''decadent'' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history, and culture, the period was no less dramatic, with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of Action française. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the école romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name) and the far-right cultural politics of Action française in the early twentieth century. It also redefines many of the debates about late nineteenth-century French poetry by complicating the political engagement of the Symbolists in an era when the French ''intellectuel'' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period.The famous line by Péguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarmé and ends in Maurras.

Postwar Beirut conjures up contradictory images of remarkable openness and inconceivable violence, of great antiquity and a bright future. The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city. Fin de Siecle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism, with postcolonial methodology, the central thesis of this book is that modern Beirut is the outcome of persistent social and intellectual struggles over the production of space. The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions competed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning, public health, education, public morality, journalism, and architecture. Jens Hanssen offers a comprehensive, original account of the emergence of modern Beirut out of an economic shift away from Acre in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. He argues that the Ottoman government's decision to heed calls for the creation of a new province around Beirut and grant it provincial capital status in 1888 paved the way for fundamental urban and regional reconfigurations long before colonial policies during the French Mandate period. This new Ottoman province came to constitute the territorial embodiment of regional self-determination for Arab nationalists in Beirut until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Drawing on published and unpublished Ottoman government documents, Arabic sources, and European archival material, Hanssen's book traces the urban experience of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. The transformation of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Beirut and the concomitant policies of urban management is vividly set against the devastating civil war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860.

Shakespeare''s Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare''s heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses'' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry''s Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal''s Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry''s Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare''s lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the ''Jack the Ripper'' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and the rise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare.Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women''s creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses'' creative networks encompassed suffragist activists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.

Shakespeare''s Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare''s heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses'' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry''s Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal''s Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry''s Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare''s lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the ''Jack the Ripper'' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and the rise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare.Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women''s creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses'' creative networks encompassed suffragist activists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.

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.

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.

The second volume in this series explores the evolution of administrative laws in Europe to better understand the foundations of EU institutions, focusing on the period of 1890-1910. These years saw both a growth of governments and either the entry into force or the consolidation of mechanisms of control on public authorities. Comparing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, the German Empire, Italy, and the United Kingdom, this title focuses on their historical administrative actions and looks at their development during that time.The volume contains three sections. The first introduces the project and the topic. The second covers the six legal systems chosen for this study, looking at the historical context. The third takes a comparative approach across the six systems, following on from their histories to look at their development and legacies. This edited collection expands on the ideals of a common core within European administrative law and how they have shaped our world.This volume is an essential tool for anyone involved in administrative and constitutional law and legal history.

The second volume in this series explores the evolution of administrative laws in Europe to better understand the foundations of EU institutions, focusing on the period of 1890-1910. These years saw both a growth of governments and either the entry into force or the consolidation of mechanisms of control on public authorities. Comparing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, the German Empire, Italy, and the United Kingdom, this title focuses on their historical administrative actions and looks at their development during that time.The volume contains three sections. The first introduces the project and the topic. The second covers the six legal systems chosen for this study, looking at the historical context. The third takes a comparative approach across the six systems, following on from their histories to look at their development and legacies. This edited collection expands on the ideals of a common core within European administrative law and how they have shaped our world.This volume is an essential tool for anyone involved in administrative and constitutional law and legal history.

In an important contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies in the Humanities, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students and scholars a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle 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 which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colourful account of such operatic favourites as Manon and Wether by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgre lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colourful account of such operatic favourites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgré lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus. For the first time opera lovers have available under a single cover a survey of a repertory profoundly influenced by the music of Richard Wagner.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the 19th century. The period covers perhaps the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history and culture, the period was no less dramatic with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of 'Action française'. Patrick McGuinness argues that the anarchist politics of many Symbolist poets is a reaction to their own isolation, and to poetry's anxious relations with the public: too 'difficult' be be widely read, Symbolist poets react to the loss of poetry's centrality among the arts by delegating their radicalism to prose: they can call, in prose, for the overthrow of the state and support anarchist bombers, while at the same time writing poems about dribbling fountains and dazzling sunsets for each other. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the école romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name), and the far-right cultural politics of Action française in the early 20th century. It also redefines many of the debates about late 19th-century French poetry by putting an argument forward for the political engagement(s) of the Symbolists while the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period.The famous line by Péguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarmé and ends in Maurras.

In an important contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies in the Humanities, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students and scholars a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle 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 which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

In an important contribution to the developing field of interdisciplinary studies in the Humanities, Ledger and Luckhurst make available to students and scholars a large body of non-literary texts which richly configure the variegated cultural history of the fin-de-siècle 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 which carefully situate individual texts within a wider cultural landscape.

Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal's Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry's Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare's lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the 'Jack the Ripper' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and the rise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare.Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women's creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses' creative networks encompassed suffragist activists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The period covers the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history, and culture, the period was no less dramatic, with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of Action française. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the école romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name) and the far-right cultural politics of Action française in the early twentieth century. It also redefines many of the debates about late nineteenth-century French poetry by complicating the political engagement of the Symbolists in an era when the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period.The famous line by Péguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarmé and ends in Maurras.

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.

The second volume in this series explores the evolution of administrative laws in Europe to better understand the foundations of EU institutions, focusing on the period of 1890-1910. These years saw both a growth of governments and either the entry into force or the consolidation of mechanisms of control on public authorities. Comparing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, the German Empire, Italy, and the United Kingdom, this title focuses on their historical administrative actions and looks at their development during that time.The volume contains three sections. The first introduces the project and the topic. The second covers the six legal systems chosen for this study, looking at the historical context. The third takes a comparative approach across the six systems, following on from their histories to look at their development and legacies. This edited collection expands on the ideals of a common core within European administrative law and how they have shaped our world.This volume is an essential tool for anyone involved in administrative and constitutional law and legal history.

Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse literary influence and reception, applicable to different historical periods and national settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws on methods associated with close reading, literary history, law and literature studies, cultural studies, and sociology of literature.Each of the book's chapters highlights how particular literary themes or techniques encouraged readers' identification with transgression and facilitated alternative forms of solidarity. The analysis draws on a range of case studies from different media forms, including: Naturalist, Decadent, and psychological novels, biographically revealing fiction ('romans à clef'), little magazines ('petites revues'), and saucy magazines ('revues légères'). Texts written by well-known literary figures--such as Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde--appear alongside previously overlooked periodical and archival sources. The book's varied corpus reveals the widespread appeal of risqué topics and illicit solidarity across the literary spectrum.

Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period''s evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary ''bad influence'', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book''s theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse literary influence and reception, applicable to different historical periods and national settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws on methods associated with close reading, literary history, law and literature studies, cultural studies, and sociology of literature. Each of the book''s chapters highlights how particular literary themes or techniques encouraged readers'' identification with transgression and facilitated alternative forms of solidarity. The analysis draws on a range of case studies from different media forms, including: Naturalist, Decadent, and psychological novels, biographically revealing fiction (''romans à clef''), little magazines (''petites revues''), and saucy magazines (''revues légères''). Texts written by well-known literary figures--such as Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde--appear alongside previously overlooked periodical and archival sources. The book''s varied corpus reveals the widespread appeal of risqué topics and illicit solidarity across the literary spectrum.

Many are familiar with European modernists' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russia, China, France, and the United States, Chu reconstructs surprising stories about cultural interactions. From Innokenty Annensky's encounter with a Tibetan monk in Paris, Aleksei Remizov's adaptations of Chinese ghost stories, and Lev Tolstoy's translations of the Daoist canon, to Ilya Mashkov's fauvist painting of a Chinese fairy, this book presents a new cultural history of fin-de-siècle Russia in relation to the East. Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics casts new light on the intricate relationships between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics. It moves beyond the idea that Russian literary and artistic representations of China were simply manifestations of Russia's imperial ideology and Eurasian cultural identity. Instead, Chu shows that literature and art actively renegotiate and destabilize the preconceived world order at a time of intensifying geopolitical and cultural transformation when China shifted from Russia's rival in Inner Asia to a target in the competition of global imperialist powers.

Many are familiar with European modernists'' interest in Chinese art and poetry, however less well known is that Russian literature and art at the turn of 20th century also flourished in a sustained dialogue with China. In Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics, Jinyi Chu reconsiders the place of Russia in the genealogy of global modernism by exploring the enduring impact of China on pre-revolutionary Russian culture. This book argues that fin-de-siècle Russian ideas about increasing global cultural and socioeconomic interconnectedness emerged from their unsettling encounters with China. Drawing on literary texts, paintings, advertisements, official documents, and archival work in Russia, China, France, and the United States, Chu reconstructs surprising stories about cultural interactions. From Innokenty Annensky''s encounter with a Tibetan monk in Paris, Aleksei Remizov''s adaptations of Chinese ghost stories, and Lev Tolstoy''s translations of the Daoist canon, to Ilya Mashkov''s fauvist painting of a Chinese fairy, this book presents a new cultural history of fin-de-siècle Russia in relation to the East. Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics casts new light on the intricate relationships between geopolitics and transnational aesthetics. It moves beyond the idea that Russian literary and artistic representations of China were simply manifestations of Russia''s imperial ideology and Eurasian cultural identity. Instead, Chu shows that literature and art actively renegotiate and destabilize the preconceived world order at a time of intensifying geopolitical and cultural transformation when China shifted from Russia''s rival in Inner Asia to a target in the competition of global imperialist powers.