Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle

"In Modernism, Romance and the fin de siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914, Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, this book shows how the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture."--Jacket.

First sentence: In the romances of the fin de siecle we have tended to see a literature of anxiety symptomatic of some more general cultural crisis.

Year

1999

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

6

Pages

228

ISBN

9780521032926

Data source: Wikidata