Modernist Works and the Fear of the Fin de Siècle Essay -- Literature

Modernist Works and the Fear of the Fin de Sicle Fin de sicle is a term which is now used to point to the head of the last 40 or so years of the Nineteenth Century and its art, yet at the term the word had genuine sociological connotations of modernity, affable decay and reaction. In France in particular though arguably throughout Europe, society was changing in such a way as to virtue such a pessimistic term for the trend evolving. The growing ability for the mass of the people to access all areas of society, previously only available to an thankful elite coupled with the growing crime rate and visible decline of this elite are factors of this social phenomenon. The modernist writers, typically the youthful offspring of the old elites, sure as shooting used fin de sicle as a theme. There is evidence of a conflict with the concept of fin de sicle, but it is too naive to say that they displayed a fear of fin de sicle. As I will try to show in this essay, the modernist reactio n to and interpretation of fin de sicle is not static and, as though proportional to the failment of modernity as an aesthetic, develops through works of varying mediums by different authors over the period identified as modernist. The phenomenon of fin de sicle is like any term, including modernism, not rigidly set chronologically. It can be used to describe any time in the period between about 1860 and around the beginning of the First World War. This roughly coincides with the chronology of modernism. This is no coincidence, since the two are linked exponentially and develop so. But whether the relationship between the works of modernism and fin de sicle is one of fear, is not a clear cut yes or no situation. In ... ...arles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Aylesbury Oxford University Press, 1993. Joris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, St Ives Penguin Books Ltd., 1959. doubting Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, St Ives Penguin Books Ltd., 1971. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity - F antasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de sicle culture, New York Oxford University Press, 1986. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, St Ives Penguin Books Ltd., 1992. Ruth Harris, Murders and wildness - Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de sicle, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1989. Eugen Weber, France - Fin de sicle, Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 1986. Richard David Sonn, French Anarchism as Cultural Politics in the 1890s, Michigan Ann Arbor, 1981. 1 Eugene Weber, France - Fin de Sicle, Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 9 - 26