Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Race and Empire in the 1890s
- Chapter 2 Island Dandies, Transpacific Decadence, and the Politics of Style
- Chapter 3 The 1890s and East Asia: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitanism
- Chapter 4 Indulekha, or The Many Lives of Realism at the Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 5 Reading World Religions in the 1890s
- Chapter 6 Night Lights: The 1890s Nocturne
- Chapter 7 The Green 1890s:
- Chapter 8 “Only Nature Is a Thing Unreal”: The Anthropocene 1890s
- Chapter 9 Weird Ecologies and the Limits of Environmentalism
- Chapter 10 Queer Theories of the 1890s
- Chapter 11 Eugenics and Degeneration in Socialist-Feminist Novels of the Mid-1890s
- Chapter 12 The Conservative and Patriotic 1890s
- Chapter 13 Decadence and the Antitheatrical Prejudice
- Chapter 14 Religion and Science in the 1890s
- Chapter 15 Little Magazines and/in Media History
- Chapter 16 Fin-de-Siècle Visuality (and Textuality) and the Digital Sphere
- Index
Chapter 6 - Night Lights: The 1890s Nocturne
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2023
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Race and Empire in the 1890s
- Chapter 2 Island Dandies, Transpacific Decadence, and the Politics of Style
- Chapter 3 The 1890s and East Asia: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitanism
- Chapter 4 Indulekha, or The Many Lives of Realism at the Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 5 Reading World Religions in the 1890s
- Chapter 6 Night Lights: The 1890s Nocturne
- Chapter 7 The Green 1890s:
- Chapter 8 “Only Nature Is a Thing Unreal”: The Anthropocene 1890s
- Chapter 9 Weird Ecologies and the Limits of Environmentalism
- Chapter 10 Queer Theories of the 1890s
- Chapter 11 Eugenics and Degeneration in Socialist-Feminist Novels of the Mid-1890s
- Chapter 12 The Conservative and Patriotic 1890s
- Chapter 13 Decadence and the Antitheatrical Prejudice
- Chapter 14 Religion and Science in the 1890s
- Chapter 15 Little Magazines and/in Media History
- Chapter 16 Fin-de-Siècle Visuality (and Textuality) and the Digital Sphere
- Index
Summary
This chapter argues that the nocturne poem, a quintessential genre of the 1890s, attunes itself to the decade’s changing relationship between the human and the natural, the aesthetic and the artificial, with some poets representing an urban, bright, smoky night sky and others presenting visions that blur city lights and starlight, or surreal representations of forests. This chapter approaches the nocturne as a transnational genre, treating British poets Mathilde Blind and Arthur Symons, alongside E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), an Indigenous Canadian poet, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who launched his career writing poetry in English in San Francisco in the 1890s. Noguchi and Johnson both play into European stereotypes that writers of color offer a premodern mystique; yet both also resist that stereotype by fully engaging with the artistic and poetic trends of the 1890s in their nocturnes and by offering alternative visions of modernity. The nocturne illuminates how transnational poets understood the night sky in the wake of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s , pp. 112 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023