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SPLIT ENDS? LITERATURE AND POLITICS AT THE FIN DE SIECLE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Jock Macleod
Jock Macleod
Affiliation:
Griffith University
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Extract

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE IN THE 1970s, my introduction to the 1890s was perfunctory. Squeezed into a couple of weeks in the middle of a year-long course on “Victorian and Modern Literature,” the literature of the decade was reduced to aestheticism and decadence and presented as something of a preliminary to the real business of modernism. Such a focus reflected the scholarship of the time, in which the fin de siècle was constructed as a moment of transition, one in which the political and socio-ethical dimensions so central to high Victorian literature were evacuated, as arguments for the autonomy of art came to dominate the literary cultural landscape. The organising principle was one of bifurcation: the separating out of avant garde from bourgeois culture, the high from the low and, of particular relevance to this essay, literature from politics.

Type
REVIEW ESSAYS
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 697 - 709
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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