Women's Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle ed. by Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O'Donnell (review)

Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O'Donnell's Women's Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle is an uneven, sometimes puzzling volume, though ultimately a welcome one. What makes it welcome is, in part, its international reach. As happens too rarely in studies of feminist literary history, the texts discussed here include works beyond Britain and the United States, published in languages other than English, and the scholars writing about them hail from locations as diverse as Turkey, Russia, and Taiwan. Admirably, the contributors make an effort to see what writing by and about women on questions of emancipation looked like across a wider-than-usual swath of cultures at a given moment in time.

But when was that moment? This is where matters grow confusing. For those familiar with the period of decadence, aestheticism, naturalism, and other avant-garde movements, the phrase fin de siècle has a precise meaning, referring to the decades of the 1880s and 1890s. In this volume, however, the chronological range is broader than its title would lead readers to expect. Evangelia Kindinger's chapter on Louisa May Alcott's sensational short stories is, in many ways, beautifully timed; it arrives just as Greta Gerwig's 2019 film of Little Women explicitly emphasizes Jo March's career as an author of such fiction and implicitly draws parallels with Alcott herself. But Pauline's Passion and Punishment—the tale on which Kindinger concentrates, when presenting Alcott as someone who used a popular genre to break through gender binaries and to explode feminine stereotypes—was published in 1863. Few historians would assert that a mid-century work embodied the same cultural moods or modes associated with the end of the century. Similarly, the chapter about "Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: A Feminist Life and Its Discourse" focuses on a woman whose dates (1814–73) position her well before the fin de siècle. It does not help that the author of this chapter, Laureano Corces, links Avellaneda, who moved often between Spain and Cuba, to the Romantic period of Hispanic literature and treats in detail a novel of hers published in 1841, again opening up the issue of how this relates to the particular characteristics of emancipation writing fifty years later. Burcin Cakir's very interesting "Gendering the Empire: The Discourse on the New Woman and Emergence of Ottoman Feminism, 1860–1918" turns the question of chronological specificity in the opposite direction, devoting much of its analysis to the post-1900 years and summarizing political and journalistic debates about Turkish women's status immediately before and during World War I.

Unfortunately, there is no introduction by the three editors of this volume to clarify the rationale behind what looks like a mashup of literary history; no one explains why the book's title does not speak of the long nineteenth century, for instance, instead of the fin de siècle (and, moreover, why there is nothing here set in a French cultural context, given the French phrasing of the concept). What takes the place of a guide to the theoretical grounding of the collection as a whole is a rather eccentric essay by only one of the editors, Shabliy. The eccentricity is signaled by its subtitle, "The New, but New, with G*d" and by the perplexing note that accompanies it: "We use the spelling G*d with an asterisk exactly as Elisabeth Schüssel [sic] Fiorenza in her book The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire" (12). This syntactically awkward statement should, of course, have credited Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, but it should also have accounted for why she is invoked here, as the topic of her study was Roman imperialism, rather than any nineteenth-century phenomena.

Although Shabliy's chapter has been...