Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle : Identity and Empire

British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a strong sense of decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle examines the ways in which perceptions of loss were cast into archetypal stories that sought to account for the culture's troubles and assuage its anxieties. By examining the work of a wide range of writers--from Kipling to Wilde, from Stevenson to Stoker--Stephen Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. Half-title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Indroduction Decline and fall Part One Strange cases, common fates 1 Strange cases, common fates: degeneration and fiction in the Victorian fin de siecle Hooligans and Fleshly Poets Degeneration and Common Sense Stigmata and "Strong Representation" Nordau and the Uses of Professional Reading 2 The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde The Atavist and the Professional The Sedulous Ape 3 Wilde's trials: reading erotics and the erotics of reading Posing Authentic Insincerity An Erotics of Reading Part Two Between the body and history 4 Men at work:from heroic friendship to male romance "We Cannot Be Greek Now" Small Things, Small People Hoc Fecit Part Three The sins of empire 5 The Occidental tourist: Stoker and reverse colonization The Miserable Skedaddle History and the Gothic Blotted Traces 6 Strange events and extraordinary combinations: Sherlock Holmes and the pathology of everyday life The Secret Theater of Home The Cesspool of Empire Strange Events and Extraordinary Combinations Male Romance and the Erotics of Interpretation 7 A universalforeignness: Kipling, race, and the great tradition The New Dickens Anglo-India and Greater Britain The Novelist Who Failed Conclusion Modernist empires and the rise of English Notes Index It has been widely recognized that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin-de-siecle representations of three forms of decline - national, biological, and aesthetic - and reveals how late-Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siecle. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.