The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (review)

The Cambridge University Press website states that their Companions offer "lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods" suitable for undergraduates, lecturers looking for course material, graduate students and researchers "keen for quick access to a comprehensive compendium of current thinking." In addition to comprehensive overviews, the site further claims that Companions "display and provoke lively and controversial debate."

The Companion to the Fin de Siècle can be said at the outset to fulfill the first claims admirably, though probably not the second. And perhaps the second was not in this case intended. As a period within the field of Victorian studies, the fin de siècle itself has tended to provoke lively and controversial debate, as the naughty decades within Victoriana, the period that fixed for modernity our versions of Salome, Dracula, Dorian Gray, She-who must be-obeyed, Jekyll-Hyde, the perverse child, the femme fatale, the Decadent, and the Aesthete. A few years ago a distinguished British scholar accused the subfield of marginalizing high Victorianism with its attractive preference for aesthetic over political modernity. The period seemed to bring out all the feminist, queer, and postcolonial theorists, always proclaiming its affinities with (post)modernism and the avant-garde rather than Victorianism proper. The subfield itself has always been the site of provocation and controversy; the making of it into a companion was already to domesticate the wild thing.

Given that the subfield is known for controversy and debate, this is a surprisingly soothing Companion. Although the influence of cultural studies is evident in its diverse and inclusive contents, it shows first the present dominance of historicism in the literary academy and second the endurance of genre as the way of organizing cultural history. Essays primarily historical in content include those on psychology (Jenny Bourne Taylor), which covers key figures in the development of the science; Decadence and Aestheticism (Dennis Denisoff), especially as self-parodied in the Yellow Book; socialism and radicalism (William Greenslade), which shows the untenable nature of the aesthetic/political modernity distinction; and publishing industries and practices (Margaret Stetz), which focuses rightly on publishing networks of the period. Essays primarily about genre include the visual arts (Shearer West), the New Woman and feminist fiction (the late Sally Ledger), realism (Stephen Arata), fantastic fiction (Nicholas Ruddick), and poetry (Marion Thain).

Most of these authors are well-known experts in their areas, and all of the essays would be of interest to students of the period and lecturers looking for course material. Greenslade's essay is characteristically strong; West's is characteristically measured and conservative in its formal treatment of even the most shocking subject matters; Ruddick's essay is particularly useful for a course on fantastic fiction, as he examines classics such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), and supplies a bibliography of lesser-known works at the end.

Three essays break the bounds of historicist and generic criticism and might have provoked debate: Richard Kaye's on sexual identity, Ross Forman's on empire, and John Stokes's on varieties of performance. Kaye's contribution is mainly devoted to homosexuality, while the highly erotic relationships between men and women in New Woman literature and Aesthetic poetry are divided between Ledger and Thain. If one were pushing the boundaries, one might expand these well-known paradigms of gender/sexual identity toward a more integrated, systemic approach to desire (as even scientists are finally doing in epigenetic or postgenomic research on the developmental niche). There are indications that Kaye might be moving in that more philosophical or anthropological direction, though his reference to "the pervasive fin de siècle concern with the genetic basis for sexual identity" seems to mean genetic only in the vague sense of inheritance rather than gene, named only in...