Editors' Introduction

Cusp is a journal that welcomes ambitious scholarship on the cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It hopes to encourage readers and contributors to reflect on temporal, geographic, disciplinary, and aesthetic senses of transition, as well as authors, works, and concerns located within this period. It is also a journal that responds in conception and approach to its current moment, a moment that is defined by schisms and precarities.

This journal has itself come into being across a cusp. We pitched it with a placeholder title to William Breichner, Journals Publisher at Johns Hopkins University Press at the 2020 MLA conference in Seattle. Timelines were sketched as we drank coffee together outside a busy conference center cafe. Three days after the conference ended the first U.S. case of COVID-19 was identified in the same city. The first lock-down began in China within two weeks. As restrictions expanded in the West over the following months, the editors emailed back and forth about intended research trips and whether this or that conference would go ahead. None did, of course. Meanwhile we redrafted the proposal together in Google Docs. During the most stringent lockdowns, months passed between emails about this project, months in which it might have become entirely buried beneath the additional labor of academic duties in pandemic times. As we picked it up again and again, developing the proposal for the JHUP Board and our prospective Editorial Board, the rhythms of setting up the journal were defined by disruption. When we met, our Zoom meeting discussions moved without pause between the journal, local lockdown restrictions, our institutions, our health, and the health of friends and family. These meetings were scheduled between online seminars and emergency department meetings, with the sound of homeschooling in the background. Of course, such porosity between the academic profession and the conditions of our personal lives is how we have all lived.

The pandemic exacerbated what we already knew about academic life in the twenty-first century. We have long lived in cuspy times. Careers and lives on a cusp, or perhaps a precipice. As we dolly out from individual experiences, we see that the tectonic plates of academia are shifting beneath us as at the same time the global order changes. In the United States, there have been dwindling numbers of majors in our departments, drops in enrollments in our courses, decreased funding for our graduate programs, and declining numbers of jobs advertised in our fields of study. In the United Kingdom, department closures in humanities have been precipitated by the marketization of higher education and a politicization of research recognition that shapes itself around government priorities. We hear our colleagues across the globe speaking to similar issues, to a similar sense of higher education transforming in ways that make our work increasingly difficult. The problems we see in the US and UK predated the pandemic. However, they have been compounded by the events of the last two years. It seems that we have reached a turning point, the cusp, of what must be a new era in humanities scholarship.

Within these almost-too-big-to-fathom and shifting global contexts, we, the editors, discussed the somewhat more manageable question of what this new journal might be. The fact that Cusp exists is an affirmation of our belief—shared by our publisher, Editorial Board, and you, we hope—in the value of studies of literature and the arts in these times and in the future. Cusp is founded on our conviction that studying literature and art in their historical contexts has tremendous political relevance for our current moment and that turning to this particular period of enormous change, the long turn of the century, can speak to and inform our experience of our own era of crisis and transition. At the same time, we hold it true that the study of literature and art also have a value in and for themselves. In the wake of years when we have been unable either to travel, to write, or at times, even to concentrate for doom scrolling, the consolations of our research have been keenly felt, even as their market value depreciates. Cusp is a broad church and it looks to publish work that reaffirms the centrality of archival research and astute close analysis.

We are acutely aware that paradigms within the humanities are changing, and we hope this journal will be a space for thinking through those changes. The current issue is, after all, titled "The Fin de Siècle at the Present Time." We want Cusp to be a home for work that offers new ways forward for the humanities, that models modes of research and writing that speak to shifts in hiring practices and student interest, that operates away from more traditional or rigid boundaries of discipline, media, national tradition, or periodization. The field of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature has often been at the vanguard of developments in literary and cultural studies. Many of us came of age reading (or indeed writing) the poststructuralist analyses of the 1980s and queer studies of the 1990s, and ours continues to be a dynamic field. It has been heartening to see recent changes set in motion within the fields of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary studies; changes that have emerged as a result of conversations about the "undisciplining" of Victorian studies and the new modernist studies.¹ These movements have resulted in a renewed attentiveness to racialization, imperialism, and previously marginalized voices. Scholars focusing on this period have been influential in the discipline's turn to environmental and digital humanities. As we move forward into still-uncertain times in our universities, therefore, our research looks to have a vibrant future. Literary history, art history, and media history will continue to reformulate themselves in ways that promote interdisciplinarity, political agency, and increasing cultural cross-pollination. It is our hope that the work published in Cusp will contribute constructively to these changes. As it welcomes scholarship of all methodological persuasions, in particular, it looks to essays that reflect on the nature of our methods, whether they be interrogations of the current critical landscape, or evaluations of earlier methodologies. In doing so, Cusp hopes to illustrate ways in which the study of the long fin de siècle is vital and present within the twenty-first century university.

_______

The phrase "on the cusp" used to describe a point at the brink of transition between two states would not have been familiar to those writers and artists whose work is the subject of this journal's articles. The phrase was popularized around the most recent fin de siècle, as cultural commentators reflected on the birth of a new century—and a new millennium—and all of its attendant anxieties. Prior to that period the phrase was mainly the province of astrology, in which it refers to the imaginary line between each of the twelve signs of the zodiac. However, though they did not know the phrase, those writing on the cusp of the previous century certainly felt the sense of trembling on a threshold that it suggests. As Edith Cooper, who with her aunt and partner Katharine Bradley published as "Michael Field," wrote in their diary on New Year's Eve, 1893: "I do not yet realise where modernity is taking me."² This uncertainty induced both excitement and anxiety for Cooper and Bradley whose social politics were complicated; they looked forward to an age when they would be able to evade the strictures of a patriarchal society, yet feared the advent of socialism. In their monumental diary "Works and Days," covering the years 1889 to Bradley's death in 1914, fear and hope, excitement and foreboding, coexist, as they did for many of the authors and artists working during this period.

But when exactly was the cusp? We have purposefully chosen not to give the journal firm temporal borders. While 1880–1920 marks out a period that might be referred to as the "long turn of the century," the "transition to modernism, or the "long fin de siècle," we do not hold fast to strict boundaries. They would exclude, at one end, arguably the most important work of aesthetic philosophy to shape the period—Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)—and, at the other, Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), which played a crucial role in defining the aims and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1925 Osbert Burdett suggested that the modernity of thought that characterized this period began with the Council of Trent in 1555.³ We would not go that far. Still, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), and Mary Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) also played a part in the cusp that we invite our contributors to map and interrogate. The boundaries between the fin de siècle and the periods on either side of it are permeable.

There will be different temporal markers in different geographical contexts too. And indeed the journal Cusp has a spatial dimension and it takes us back to that question of what it means to consider the fin de siècle at the present time. In geometry a "cusp" is a "point at which two branches of a curve meet and stop, with a common tangent".⁴ It encourages us to think about those points at which different "branches" connect, those moments of aesthetic exchange or violent rupture that occur when different cultures meet. One of Cusp's integral aims is to foster scholarship across national boundaries and historical racial divides. There are no national boundaries or borders to what we publish. We welcome essays that challenge our sense of when the "cusp" may have been and interrogate the Eurocentric version of modernity it so often implies. As our physical worlds became restricted due to COVID-19 restrictions, the conceptual scope of literary studies seemed to open out increasingly to global and cross-cultural literatures. It is indicative of this refreshing wave that so many contributors to the current issue focus on transnational exchanges in the period. In doing so they illustrate that research that traverses the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides particularly rich opportunities for engaging histories of race and colonialism, as radical shifts in the treatment of borders, nations, and racial categories were happening across the century's turn.

Writers and artists on the cusp of the twentieth century often saw themselves as cosmopolitan, inhabiting a liberal republic of letters for which borders were anathema. Other writers were perennially displaced by the violence of settler colonialism and the tide of wars—little and great—that characterized the geopolitics of the period. Whether we think of those whose lives were spent voluntarily between cultures, both physically and intellectually, those who were temporarily or permanently in exile as a result of political persecution, or those "subjects" of the British Empire who came to London to study, this was a period of displacement and peripatetic movement. As people traveled, so texts and traditions crossed national boundaries, being repurposed in radical new ways. Take for example the work of Filipino revolutionary José Rizal whose novel El Filibusterismo (1891) developed the decadent aesthetic of Huysmans's À rebours to raise anticolonial consciousness or the Chinese neo-sensualist Shao Xunmei (邵洵美) who was inspired by Swinburne and Baudelaire to revolutionize the Shanghai literary scene in the 1920s.

It is essential to this transnationalism that Cusp has a strong interest in global networks and circulation. Much of what made this era feel like a moment of transition had to do with the sense that travel, contact, and communication had been accelerated and intensified. Better understanding of these circuits of movement and exchange renders turn-of-the-century texts more legible. E. Pauline Johnson's The White Wampum (1895), published in the UK by John Lane at the Bodley Head, articulates a very specific North American vision of a cusp or a turn, to seismic shifts in Canadian history, to attempts to eradicate Native cultures in North America. However, her poetry was being advertised in London, in Lane's 1895 catalog, alongside the Keynote series, which featured the works of decadent and New Woman writers, each with a title page designed by Aubrey Beardsley. How might it enrich our comprehension of Johnson's resistance to apocalyptic discourses concerning Native disappearance to understand her work in concert with decadent visions of history and change? Similarly, what might be gained by reading the imagining of new Black futures at the fin de siècle in, for example, Pauline Hopkins's "A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by its Descendants" (1905) or Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) as part of a broader upending of conventional narratives of progress occurring on both sides of the Atlantic? Cusp also invites the consideration of circuits and exchanges that cross the Pacific, such as Mexican modernist Salvador Novo's linking of the impact of US injustices in Mexico and Hawaii in his travel writing, or that circumvent North America, such as Colombian modernist José Anunción Silva's turn to Baudelaire and Verlaine in After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a Decadent (1896, 1925).

"Cusp" also has an aesthetic dimension. It names "a point, pointed end, apex, peak; an ornament of a pointed form."⁵ From design to architecture, the cusp marks the exquisite termination of a shape, but also the transition from one point in a filigree to another. This aesthetic register is vital to Cusp's remit of publishing work across the arts at the fin de siècle, a vital moment in the arts, which is not always well served by the disciplinary and period boundaries imposed by academic journals. With this in mind, Cusp is a venue for those who work in cinema history, fine arts, music, architecture, fashion, design, and any other disciplines that speak to its interests. This was a period in which the arts were galvanized and antagonized by the revolutions of photography and cinema. In 1895 cinema shorts were a novelty; by 1915 feature films were the world's most popular entertainment, and by the early 1920s, cinema had become an art form. At the same time, furniture design took on an intense political valence, and international exhibitions and art periodicals contributed to the emergence of multiple international avant-gardes. We are interested in exploring those points of intermedia transition and exchange that were such a vital element of this period, such as the influence of the photographs of Hindu temple sculpture shared by Ananda Coomaraswamy on the modernist sculpture of Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein or the interplay between modernist aesthetics and radio technology. We are also interested in how the art forms produced "on the cusp" were cited and repurposed across the twentieth and twenty-first century, from Beardsley and Wilde's influence on the fashion, music and design of the 1960s, to the dialogue contemporary film is having with literature on the cusp, such as Guillermo del Toro drawing inspiration from Arthur Machen.

Networks, communities, and friendships have permeated the brief tour of the long turn of the century above. We did not plan it this way but it is apt. Since the first Cusp meeting at MLA 2020 there has been much time to long for the academic community that we miss and to think about the academic community as we would like it to be. As Cusp invites and nurtures new possibilities for approaching the long turn of the century, we hope that this journal will help to foster new collaborations and conversation across fields, across time periods, and across national boundaries, and be a forum for work that, like the material it will study, turns toward the political realities of the moment to engage directly with and develop strategies for negotiating crisis and rapid transition.