Stephen Arata

Fictions of loss in the Victorian fin de siecle

Introduction Part I. Strange Cases, Common Fates Part II. Between the body and history Part III. The sins of Empire Conclusion Notes Index.

The fin de siècle

A Critical Essay (1868) and Yeatss eclectic edition of The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) are landmarks of fin-de-siecle literary culture. The productive estrangement from usual modes of thought and perception is central to the aesthetics of fin-de-siecle Symbolism, which drew extensively on the work of Baudelaire and Pater. In Yeatss fin-de-siecle work, he tries to produce the illusion that the world evoked in his poems exists prior to or even apart from our experiences of the poems themselves. One of Paters great achievements in The Renaissance is to recast Kantian aesthetics in the twin vocabularies of Victorian physics and physiology. In History of Aesthetic(1892), Bernard Bosanquet notes the significance of aesthetics in the development of economic theory in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spiritual and aesthetic aridity of middle-class life is a constant theme of fin de siecle literature.