Title: London in the 1890s : a cultural history /
Authors: Beckson, Karl, 1926-2008
Publisher: W.W. Norton,
Year: 1992
Subjects: Literature English.; English literature History and criticism; English literature England London History and criticism; Decadence (Literary movement) England London.; Modernism (Literature) England London.; Modernism (Art) England London.; Art history; Culture history.; London (England) Intellectual life
Abstract: Outcries against obscene art and behavior; anxiety about national decline in the face of emerging superpowers; bitter debate about women's roles and behavior; fear of a dangerous underclass festering in urban slums; misgivings about the price of progress; multicultural enthusiasms; vogues for a new age of mysticism and the occult; widespread feeling that the world is changing faster than anyone can assimilate. Not America in the 1990s, but England in the 1890s as this fascinating book reveals. In the tradition of Carl Schorske's Fin de Siecle Vienna, Karl Beckson shows how in the 1890s London drew together and nurtured the seeds of modernism. Here are the great figures of that time - Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Beardsley, Kipling, Gladstone, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, among many others - engaged in the movements and debates, the great shifts in public behavior and feeling, that would make the world we know. The result is an entertaining cultural history that brings before us the time and the place where Victorianism gave birth to modernism.
Contents: TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Socialist utopias and anarchist bombs -- The damnation of decadence -- Tragic Rhymers and mythic Celts -- The quest for a poet laureate -- Prostitutes on the promenade -- The new woman -- The new drama -- Love in earnest: the importance of being Uranian -- Trials and tribulations -- Defying the commercial periodicals -- Whistler, the fantastic butterfly -- Perfect and imperfect Wagnerites -- In the troughs of Zolaism -- The dance of the occult mysteries -- Empire builders and destroyers.