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  • The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts ed. by Josephine Guy
  • Keelia Estrada Moeller (bio)
Josephine Guy, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 439, $200/£125 hardcover.

The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts examines overarching themes and tropes, moments of cultural transformation, and challenges associated with the fin de siècle. As the collection of essays reveals, fin de siècle literature has many characteristics, including but not limited to: a rejection of Victorian popular culture; a celebration of the contemporary and urban; the inclusion of cultural aspects manifest in literature, art, music, interior decoration, sexual behavior, and gender identification; and a distinct consciousness of cultural change.

The collection is divided into four sections. The first section defines the fin de siècle and its characteristics. It also explores the material history of print media and associated moments of cultural change. For example, in "Decadence and Institutions of Modernism," Kirsten MacLeod analyzes the little magazines that proliferated in America and Great Britain. She writes, "Little magazines presented [decadent] literature in an ephemeral format as the shock of the new and the height of fashionable modernity, [and] its placement within broader lists of small presses and publishers and its decorative material embodiment gave it greater cultural legitimacy" (27). In "The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press," Alison Chapman notes that the "materialism of print was then part of the fin-de-siècle turn to stylisation" (48). Chapman intriguingly links the aesthetic beauty of visual art in fin de siècle poetry to the emergence of the "new girl," arguing that "the decorative, playful beauty of the visual field of the poem also ironically signifies for the 'new girl' readers the importance of good form in another sense too: the sense of physical comeliness as the proper form of middle-class femininity" (60).

Section one also explores fin de siècle aesthetics, highlighting how the city, the Gothic, and Catholicism became noted characteristics of the period. Several essays examine different literary or artistic responses to these phenomena. As Andrew Smith argues in "Gothic Aesthetics," the city became a key setting in fin de siècle Gothic fiction because "gothic writers had long realized that their audiences were far more frightened by the prospect of evil manifesting itself in their own world rather than in a fictional setting long ago and far away" (85). Miriam Elizabeth Burstein explains in "Catholicism and the Fin de Siècle" that Catholicism influenced literature of the period both theologically and culturally. For instance, the critiques of realism and materialism in fin de siècle literature reflect the core anxieties faced by Catholics. [End Page 175]

The second section focuses on geographical aspects of the British fin de siècle, investigating cultural events and developments in Scotland, Ire-land, Birmingham, and Nottingham that influenced the period's themes and tropes. In "Fin-de-Siècle Scotland," for example, Caroline McCracken Flesher examines key writers from the period, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Buchanan, and James Young Geddes, among others, and the literary landscapes they depicted. She concludes that Scottish writing "establishes the fin de siècle not as a delimited or national phenomena, but rather as a problem posed to place and, most significantly, to time" (181). In "'Truth About Russia': Russia in Britain at the Fin de Siècle," Anna Vaninskaya highlights how the swell of Russian immigrants affected London's East End and how rivalries between Russia, France, Germany, and Italy shaped the fin de siècle.

The third section centers on the New Women of the 1890s, including writers such as Ménie Muriel Dowie, and explores how they remade themselves through political or religious activism. As Jad Adams contends in "The 1890s Woman," "No quarter was given to single women; they had to make their own way, competing on unequal terms in a market biased towards men" (290). This section also addresses how representations and experiences of women during the fin de siècle differed from those...

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