1900: A Fin-De-Siecle Reader (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.) - Softcover

Neve, Michael; Jay, Mike

3.5

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780141180830: 1900: A Fin-De-Siecle Reader (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141180838 ISBN 13: 9780141180830

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1999

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At the turn of the nineteenth century many people were terrified or thrilled by the unstoppable progress of science, wrestling with questions of sexual identity and turning away from traditional religion. What are the similarities and differences between their experience and ours, at the close of our decade and the dawn of a new millennium? Bringing together poetry and pulp fiction, scientific polemic and sexological speculation alongside classic texts, 1900 offers an astonishing range of fascinating, and often shocking, writing.

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Review:

"The fin-de-si�cle was in fact the true Millennium", Mike Jay and Michael Neve confidently assert, and from the evidence of this full and fascinating collection they may be right. While 1999 pretended to be on the brink of oblivion, with its millennium virus and post modern end of all certainty, summer holidays for 2000 were still being booked. If you want real panic, then go back a century. The late Victorians' anxieties were multiple and strangely familiar: "The future of the human race, the apocalyptic possibilities opened up by science, the crisis of faith, the mass belief in the paranormal, the future role of women, the multicultural 'global village'". Jay and Neve have compiled over 100 snippets that together make a convincing case that fin-de-si�cle is more than just a marketing ploy. Some of the pieces are expected--H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species--but others are ingeniously chosen. There are enlightening sections on late 19th-century spiritualism, atheism and the emergent sexology that don't merely go for the obvious--the rise of "the unconscious", for example, predictably draws on Freud, Nietzsche and Charcot, but juxtaposes them neatly with Strindberg, George Du Maurier's Trilby and H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau. Most striking perhaps is the final chapter on "imagining the next century", with scary pieces on "feeble-mindedness" and "lethal chambers for the insane": nevertheless, they're tame compared with what actually transpired. Inevitably, this miscellany of often very short pieces will leave you hungry for more, but that's all to the good. There's a wealth of literature waiting to be explored: let's hope Jay and Neve's inspired collection opens the floodgates. -- Alan Stewart

Synopsis:

An anthology of the 19th-century "fin-de-siecle" focusing on late-19th-century versions of the end as broadcast within the social sciences. It presents attempts to categorize the varieties of human failing related to heredity, sexual perversity, race, atavistic regression, insanity and criminality.

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