<i>Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s</i>, edited by Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney

Cambridge University Press’s ambitious new series Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition aims to reframe some of our outdated but persistent critical assumptions about each decade of the nineteenth century from the 1830s to the 1890s, with three volumes already available (1860s, 1880s, and 1890s) and three coming soon (1830s, 1850s, and 1870s). Arguably, however, no decade would seem to have more of a claim to the title than the 1890s; it was at once a distinct moment in literary and cultural history and a transitionary moment between Victorian aesthetics and modernism. And yet, even these seemingly self-evident assumptions are productively put into question and reframed. Questions about periodization and genre look different when, like many of the contributors, we widen our scope beyond “Britishness and Eurocentrism” to mutual international influences and the global circulation of culture that characterized the 1890s. For example, Sukanya Banerjee’s essay on the popularity of Indian realism questions the oversimplified literary history in which the “waning of realism” in the 1890s “cleared the ground for the advent of modernism” and its “nonmimetic modes of experimentation” (78). Her assurance that “we also know better” (78) is at once an accurate assessment of how recent scholarship on the fin de siècle has troubled some of the stereotypes and narratives about the period and a testament to how the stubborn persistence of those narratives makes a collection such as this eminently necessary, timely, and valuable.For example, as much as we might “know” that there was more to the 1890s than sexual dissidence, New Women, crises of faith, and anarchist and socialist politics, essays like Alex Murray’s “Conservative and Patriotic 1890s” point out that in practice “[w]e want our decadents to be always aloof from the imperialists, our realists and mystics facing each other with daggers drawn” (247). Instead, by taking a broader perspective, we can see the wide popularity of a counter-decadent movement, the “multifaceted” nature of conservatism in the period (252), and the way in which writers and movements associated with decadence were drawn to conservative and patriotic politics and ideologies. Murray traces the growing nationalism of progressive figures like A. C. Swinburne and Michael Field who reach “an apex with the almost hysterical jingoism that greeted the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War” (257). Diana Maltz also challenges our assumptions about the ideological and political commitments of New Woman writers. Her essay focuses on the neglected genre of socialist-feminist novels that, in adopting Edward Carpenter’s program for an ethical and simple life, engaged in eugenicist critiques of the decadent, aristocratic, “defective male body” and his diseased and weak progeny (228). Even if these critiques were a vehicle to “reject middle-and upper-class convention in favor of health and liberation,” socialist feminists “were among the most vocal exponents” of this popular form of eugenic counter-decadence, “propelling it into state policy and mainstream culture” (228, 243, 243).Just as Murray and Maltz critique our assumptions about the politics of the 1890s, a number of other essays could be interpreted broadly to interrogate the stereotype of the “Naughty Nineties”—whether in the realm of sexuality or anti-religious and amoral secularism. As Simon Joyce reminds us, our tendency to turn to Oscar Wilde as the central figure of sexual dissidence in discourses of sexual and gender identity for the 1890s obscures both important other voices on sexuality and gender and the way that his model was “already regressive in the 1890s,” relying on a hierarchical and asymmetrical pederasty (209). Instead (especially in his later works), it is Edward Carpenter who is able to think through a “coalitional model” allowing for “the interaction between same-sex advocacy and gender based progressive activism” (223). While she returns to Wilde as a touchstone, Anne Stiles directly takes on the “secularization thesis” (285), which posits the “waning of religious faith” in the 1890s (285) partly due to a clash between religion and science. Instead, Stiles argues, “these seemingly opposing forces came together, or at least peacefully coexisted during the 1890s” (286). Like Murray, Stiles emphasizes the popularity of Marie Corelli, whose self-presentation as an “orthodox member of the Church of England and a champion of morals that were eroding in a godless, scientific age” (296) was one of the key sources of her appeal—despite her combination of decadent tropes, interest in “heterodox faiths,” including her personal creed, “the so-called Electric Creed of Christianity” (296), and a personal life as “eccentric . . . as Wilde himself” (296). Both Wilde and Corelli “navigated faith and doubt” by blending elements of science, aestheticism, and heterodox and occult faiths (301). Sebastian Lecourt addresses both the idea of the secular ’90s and the “Naughty Nineties” by exploring interest in non-Western religion. While the “outré spiritual organizations” of the period have received the most attention as previews of a modernism that “used Eastern religions to challenge middlebrow taste,” Lecourt shows that popular works on world religion formulated a “middlebrow ecumenicalism” that appealed to a wide variety of “middle-class aesthetes, radical Dissenters, occult dabblers” and set the stage for “popular religious liberalism in the twentieth century” (99). For Adam Alston, the “naughtiness” of decadent theater cut both ways; perennial critics of theater’s ontological “wrongness” were especially outraged by the supposedly degrading and demoralizing effects of decadent theater—a corruption especially linked to the “shared space” of ephemeral performance (264, 271). At the same time, symbolist and decadent writers argued not only that Victorian theater was a decadent “outmoded institution” with declining standards but also that performance and embodiment threatened the “metaphysical purity” of their works (275). Ultimately, however, this broad anti-theatricality ended up having a “generative role . . . in the emergence and development of modernism” (273).Some of the essays, however, also explore figures, genres, and topics that most scholars don’t already “know” about. As the editors argue, the introduction of figures “obscure even to specialists” is not done in the name of recovery for recovery’s sake; rather, it is a natural outgrowth of new methodologies and perspectives that “necessarily summon our attention to new texts and issues” (5). Nevertheless, this expanded scope is of a piece with a number of the collection’s goals: to defamiliarize the stories we tell about the period; to “undiscipline Victorian studies” by centering “questions of race, empire, and global circulation” (10); and to lean into forms of strategic presentism “with the goal of enhancing both our comprehension of the 1890s and our current moment” (6). Zarena Aslami’s “Race and Empire in the 1890s” achieves many of these goals. She sidesteps the question of whether the 1890s was an “interregnum” (as Raymond Williams puts it) between Victorian and modern and widens the scope beyond literary periodization and national boundaries (21). Instead, the 1890s, she argues, was a “hinge” between two models of the human itself—between an earlier nineteenth-century (still “biocentric” and racist) idea of the “impressible body” and the “biocentric, racist notion of the rigid body determined by genetic inheritance” (22). While this, too, is a familiar narrative, Aslami argues that this emergent category of racial determinism is double edged. Reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Story of the Brown Hand,” she argues that the exchangeability of brown bodies (and body parts) embeds both a possibility and an anxiety that “brown exchangeability can be flipped on its head and enable brown collectivity, brown resistance, and the brown undoing of empire” (33). Lindsay Wilhelm’s essay introduces us to Hawaiian “pioneering hula master and musician” Ioane Ūkēkē, known as “the Dandy,” as a way of tracing “a peculiar construction of dandyish masculinity . . . in transpacific writing from the last decades of the nineteenth-century,” as well as an international circulation of culture “in a period of accelerating colonization” (41). This focus on networks of mutual influence helps us avoid relegating “writers of color to relatively passive postures of appropriation or rejection” (42). Despite the growth in literature in English about China and Japan, and the intensifying networks of trade and travel, the lack of available translations of East Asian literature meant that “literary networks with East Asia were slower to form” (64). Stefano Evangelista’s essay on representations of East Asia in the 1890s focuses on Lafcadio Hern’s writing, exploring how his “embodied experience” living in Japan “unsettles familiar categories of perspective” (66). But he also contrasts Hearn with Wo Chang’s Britain Through Chinese Spectacles (1897) as a pointed critique of British writing on East Asia and (more broadly) a “relentless deconstruction of Victorian liberalism” (72). Both, however, practice a form of “critical cosmopolitanism” that critiques “geopolitical and cultural relations” (63). Banerjee’s essay, mentioned above, also introduces us to Indian author O. Chandumenon, his immensely popular novel Indulekha (1889–90), and the Nairs (a Hindu community in Malabar), who “followed a gynocentric social system” based on matriliny (80).While the collection is not explicitly divided into thematic or subject areas, the account I have given so far has already identified shared topics. A cluster of essays in the center of the collection focuses on 1890s ecological writing and our current climate crisis. Emily Harrington’s essay on the nocturne explores this international and interdisciplinary genre in the context of the atmospheric effects of coal gas into something “menacing and beautiful,” as well as the way poets associate these effects with workers, “women . . . sex, and even with poetic language—objects for exploitation taken from nature and transformed into something human-made for human use” (115, 118). A focus on ecology can also help recover “forgotten or suppressed writers, or writers that did not fit into well-known canonical narratives of literary periods” (132). Thus, the female poets Ana Parejo Vadillo explores in “The Green 1890s” are often left out of accounts of environmental politics. She shows how “they critiqued and gendered colonial capitalist ideologies” on a global scale (134), condemned modern agriculture and eco-imperialism, and argued for an art that would be “environmentally sustainable” (134, 165). Elizabeth Miller’s essay takes the familiar decadent trope of the hot-house flower as its starting point—not as an emblem of the decadent elevation of the artificial over nature, but as “paradigmatic of the greenhouse gas effect” and an example of the way “literature and art of the period reckoned” with a nature “profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning or control” (171). But Miller’s scope is actually much broader and more ambitious. She explores the way these works reorient our understanding of periodization, “temporal duration,” and the representations of systems, temporalities, and “problems otherwise too large to grasp” (177). Miller’s reading of Dorian Gray and its “Anthropocene hedonism” (175) is particularly ingenious. Just as the greenhouse “concentrates light and atmosphere,” its famous portrait “concentrates years” and acts as a “metacommentary” suggesting that “art’s compactness imbues it with the capacity to miniaturize problems otherwise too large to grasp” (177). Miller extrapolates this into a broader literary and environmental method of “microscaling” (178): “an interpretive mode where the small elucidates the big. . . . The fin de siècle and its decadent imaginary appear capable of perceiving fin du globe precisely from the narrow circumstance of a century’s end: the greenhouse gas effect captured in the green carnation” (178). If Miller stresses the important role humans play in shaping nature and the ways of grasping the ungraspable, Dennis Denisoff’s essay addresses the “ecological weird,” a sense of dread, horror, “transpatial, and transtemporal disorientation” (197) when faced with “an ecological force seemingly acting on indeterminate motivations with little or no concern for people” (187). While acknowledging “deleterious impact of human activity on the environment” (191), mainstream Victorian environmentalist discourse was framed around management, stewardship, and preservation, retaining a sense of both “human authority and competence” and a separation between human and natural (193). Pushing back against this human “entitlement,” the eco-weird does not simply revel in despair but rather “take[s] on the role of ecocriticism” by offering “a range of alternatives” that decenter human agency and imagine the (often disconcerting and weird) implications of extending agency to nonhuman, “mysterious or yet unrecognized” forces (189).The collection ends with a pair of essays focusing on media ecologies in transition in the 1890s and in our current digital moment. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra argues that shifting to a “media-based approach” puts the periodical rather than the book at its center and requires thinking through forms of media and technology that are “always in transition” (305). Her focus is specifically on the “little magazine,” characterized by its countercultural orientation, resistance to the “industrial mainstream press” (309), and self-conscious interest in “preindustrial” technologies and practices. Even as they seem to look backward rather than forward in time, the little magazine simultaneously remains part of international networks of “local/global exchange” and acts as “new media in their own day” (307, 324). The existence of digital tools like the Yellow Nineties 2.0 (which Kooistra directs) will ensure that these magazines remain a form of media in transition. Finally, Rebecca N. Mitchell uses the popular interdisciplinary aesthetic ideology of the “unity of the arts” as a way of resurfacing the important role women played in fin de siècle visual culture (328). If the dominance of Aubrey Beardsley (like Wilde) obscured figures who were even more representative of the age, Mitchell focuses on artists working in the multimedia textual and visual art of books and journals who were capable of a broad “variability of style” and spoke to the “diversity of influence . . . informing visual arts of the 1890s” (336). Contemporary desires for interoperable digital formats (like the International Image Interoperability Framework) echo 1890s calls for a “network model that was imagined by the Arts and Crafts guilds” (347). But Mitchell remains skeptical that we can fully overcome the obstacles that remain—obstacles that haunted the same project in the 1890s. This, however, she argues, is “no reason to abandon its promise” (348).The note of guarded optimism at the end of Mitchell’s essay is a fitting end to this volume and the period it represents. Even as it unsettles the idea of “transition,” along with many of the other critical commonplaces about the 1890s, this rich set of essays speaks to the relevance of the 1890s as a distinct literary period—to some of the most important critical trends in the field and our “vexed and apocalyptic” present (6). This collection and the critical conversations it will make possible, like the fin de siècle itself, constitute both “an end as well as a beginning” (6).