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This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.

This chapter examines the intersections between romance and New Woman fictions on the question of sexual knowledge. It shows that New Woman author and the romance writer may both now be resituated within a broader Victorian female tradition, a vibrant literary community, a strong history of dialogue and debate. It demonstrates that the New Woman herself stands revealed as daughter to a host of rebellious, transitional heroines from the literature of the later nineteenth century.

The introduction starts by defining the theoretical framework in the context of recent and current debates on ‘multiple modernities’, which often fail to include Latin America. This section then moves on to discuss the relevance of and relation between key categories, primarily those of ‘civilisation’ and ‘decadence’ − which were increasingly used in association with each other − with respect to the more recent notion of degeneration which provided them with a scientific analytical foundation. In the late nineteenth-century, many started to feel that ‘modern civilisation’ carried within itself the danger of deviance, especially as the medical model of social analysis became established. I discuss here how these debates culminated in the years between the mid-1890s and the early 1900s, when the process of nation-building and economic prosperity reached its peak in the Southern Cone as the rapid changes that had taken place during the previous two decades became consolidated. Among the main consequences were the growth of the urban population and the consequent rise of the so-called ‘social question’. It was during this time that the need to rethink how the idea of civilisation should be approached acquired for the first time such huge prominence in Latin America.

The poet, critic and short story writer Arthur Symons (1865–1945) was an inveterate traveller who wrote frequently about the Channel and the North Cornish coasts in poetry and prose. During the 1890s and 1900s, he was at the forefront of the pre-modernist avant-garde, and was an important conduit for the dissemination of decadent and impressionist art in England. As a landscape writer, he blended the quasi-Impressionist methods of painters such as Whistler with the decadent’s concern with the privileged subjectivity of the artist. This chapter examines the implications of such practices for his treatment of Cornwall, Sussex and Dieppe – including in neglected later writings such as ‘Sea Magic’ (1920).

This chapter appraises the second landmark of the Fin-de-Siècle genre, Elektra. A dancer sustaining on fantasies of blood sacrifice, eroticizing her kinship with her sister and brother, raising the voice of her hysterical desires in contrast to the shrill babble of the serving maids who act as a chorus, Elektra rivaled the frenzy of her predecessor, Salome, being born of the same progenitor, Richard Strauss. This chapter delves into the essence of unabashed supremacism emitted from Salome's and Elektra's indifferent free reign over the rest of the opera, amidst a general chorus that is rendered timid and ignorable by the protagonist's undoubted reign over the scene in those obvious moments. In an attempt to bridge the two characters Weininger provides an appropriate allegory—while Salome represents violent eroticism, Elektra displays erotic violence. In their dynamics they contrast the highs and lows of human nature, and subsequently the realization of supremacist culture.

The fin de siècle does not immediately spring to mind as a period sympathetic to supranational Luso-Brazilian literary and cultural bonds. The period witnessed a sequence of events that distanced Portugal and Brazil politically, and destabilized both countries. Brazil’s republican coup (1889) put the final nail in the coffin of the Luso-Brazilian empire and led to a transatlantic financial crisis; Britain’s “Ultimatum” (1890) to Portugal regarding its African claims undermined the monarchy; and Portugal’s limited intervention in Brazil’s Revolta da Armada (1893-94) led to a temporary suspension of diplomatic relations. Further, the aggressive nationalism of the early years of Brazil’s Old Republic was marked by a pronounced lusofobia. And negative stereotypes about Brazil and brasileiros (nouveau riche Portuguese returnees) remained popular comic fodder in Portugal. I contend that this agitated state of affairs prompted a cohort of Brazilian and Portuguese writers to affirm enduring Luso-Brazilian ties despite their political unpopularity. I will focus on three moments of Luso-Brazilianist activity during the period: Joaquim Nabuco’s 1880 and 1888 speeches in Rio de Janeiro’s Gabinete Português de Leitura, the publication of Oliveira Martins’s O Brasil e as Colônias Portuguesas (1888), and the 1916 visit to Portugal of Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac.

It is well known that Somerville and Ross were deeply influenced by the art of fin-de-siècle Paris, but little scholarship explores their representations of that city. This chapter argues that the individual’s ability to exist within the city is firstly determined by one’s relationship to economics, which is, fundamentally, shaped by one’s gender. For Somerville and Ross, Paris in the nineteenth century is a place of artistic possibilities that is not equally available.

Katherine Cecil Thurston’s 1910 novel, Max, explores the bohemian Paris of the fin-de-siècle through the eyes of a young artist newly arrived from Russia. This young man is, however, actually a young princess in disguise, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Through the use of disguise and the New Woman figure of the female-to-male transvestite, this novel represents Paris through two competing genres: the masculine adventure narrative and the female romance.

In Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Dracula visits the cinematograph upon arrival in London, made plausible by setting the scene in the year of the novel's publication, 1897. The film forcefully reminds us that Dracula and cinema are contemporaneous; fin-de-siècle Gothic and cinema emerge concurrently because they are produced out of the same cultural, social and historical forces. Supernatural claims were made on behalf of cinematic technology: ‘death will no longer be final’, concluded one account of the Lumière Cinématographe premiere. Less enamoured reporters described the new medium in strange and spectral, even deathly, terms; most famously perhaps, Maxim Gorky: ‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows…’. But if there was something ‘Gothic’ about emergent cinema, there was something ‘cinematic’ about the resurgent Gothic. This chapter identifies and analyses proto-filmic elements in works by Stevenson, Wilde, Wells and Stoker.

This chapter analyses the relationship between Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and colonial politics, placing The Beetle within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns. The chapter provides a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. The chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

This essay focuses on the ‘monstrous’ deformities of Miserrimus Dexter in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and their framing within the Victorian interest in teratology – the study of genital birth defects. Born without legs, Dexter is a taxonomical conundrum, positioned somewhere between subject and object and between madness and knowledge. His deformity is, as Katherine Angell makes clear, the object of scientific investigation, but it must also be interpreted in order to resolve the mystery at the heart of the novel’s plot. The dangerous knowledge that he possesses, which as much concerns his deformed body as the key to the novel’s mystery, threatens to exceed the symbolic order and thereby render questionable the ordering principles of science and medicine.

This essay fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian as the ‘icon for the literally and metaphorically penetrable male body in the late nineteenth century’. Sarah Parker regards him as a focus for the aesthetic and decadent impulses of the fin de siècle, particularly appealing to non-heteronormative sexualities, but also as a contrasting exemplum for degeneration discourse. Sebastian’s prevalence in the literature of the late nineteenth century, Parker argues, codifies a nascent aesthetics of homosexual suffering while at the same time offering a provocative metaphorisation of sodomitic activity. It further articulates same-sex relationships with the religious tradition of suffering, producing strikingly eroticised poetry that fantasises about penetrating the wounds not only of Sebastian but also of Christ.

This chapter focuses on the most conceptual use of the ‘underground’ that divorces the term from direct spatial connotations. In this ideological framework, Marxism, nationalism and terrorism all converge in the network of subterranean, subversive activities, which extend beyond the borders of London to Russia, Ireland, Continental Europe and the Americas. Although socialist gatherings and political meetings were often spatialised in underground terms as hidden, secret and covert, the rhetoric of political movements was pervasive and contagious on the surface of the city, as political demonstrations and dynamite detonations terrorised the urban imagination. However, the chapter also examines the absence of terrorism in literary works, where the spectre of violence pervades the novel in private and domestic ways. As in previous chapters, women are aligned with subterranean activities, but in a revolutionary context, women are often depicted as ‘networkers’ in the web of intrigue, more threatening than the male counterparts themselves.