The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914

by Mark Hearn

Overview

This book explores the fin de siècle, an era of powerful global movements and turbulent transition, in Australia and beyond through a series of biographical microhistories. From the first wave feminist Rose Summerfield and the working class radical John Dwyer, to the indigenous rights advocate David Unaipon and the poet Christopher Brennan, Hearn traces the transnational identities, philosophies, ideas and cultures that characterised this era.

Examining the struggles and aspirations of fin de siècle lives; respect for the rights of women and indigenous peoples, the injustices and hardship inflicted on working men and women, and the ways in which they imagined a better world, this book examines the transformation and renewal brought about by fin de siècle ideas. It examines the distinctive characteristics of this 'great acceleration' of economic, technological and cultural forces that swept the globe at the turn of the 19th century both within an Australian context and on the world stage. Asserting that the fin de siècle was significant for the making of modern Australia, and demonstrating the impact Australian fin de siècle lives had on the transnational and global movements of the era, Mark Hearn traces the turbulent nature of the fin de siècle imagination in Australia, and its response to these dynamic forces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350291416
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/14/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Mark Hearn is Senior Lecturer of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Australia. The author of several books and scholarly articles in journals such as Gender and History, Rethinking History and National Identities, his research focuses on the history of ideas and governance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mark Hearn is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Australia. His research focuses on the history and historical theory of the fin de siècle, and the history of ideas and governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has published several books and has had scholarly articles accepted in a wide range of journals including Journal of Australian Studies, Gender and History and Rethinking History. In 2018 he was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Philosophical Studies in History, University of Oulu, Finland, researching the historical periodization of the fin de siècle.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Ends and Beginnings: Life and Mind at the Australian Fin de Siècle
1. The Bush Undertaker: Henry Lawson and the Stragglers of the Second Industrial Revolution
2. Rose Summerfield Imagines a New Woman
3. The Wanderer: Christopher Brennan's Two Lives in Fin de Siècle Sydney
4. 'A Modern Eve': Vida Goldstein Stands for Parliament
5. 'Some Disquieting Symptoms': Alfred Deakin's Nervous Breakdown
6. David Unaipon, 'The Super-Aborigine'
7. John Dwyer's Family Stories
Conclusion: Fin de Siècle Afterlife

Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

At last, the Australian experience of the extraordinarily volatile period known as the fin de siècle has found its historian. Carl Schorske first explained the significance of the era, and offered a brilliant model for understanding it, in his Fin-De-Siècle Vienna of 1979. Mark Hearn picks up where Schorske left off, amplifying his biographic structure and building on his profound insights. Hearn, though, has a theatre that adds the missing piece to the fin de siècle puzzle: a settler colonial site that shows how imperial forces drove many of the political and cultural crises of these crucial decades. Hearn's study includes women and Indigenous characters in with the more usual mix of male artists and European intellectuals. The result is an exemplary account for the twenty-first century.” —Kate Fullagar, Professor of History, Australian Catholic University, Australia

“Mark Hearn is the first historian to bring this important period in Australian cultural and political history – the 1890s – fully into the global history of modernity. Far from displaying an isolated colonial backwater, his study of seven emblematic lives of the fin de siècle gives us a unique insight into how leading Australian thinkers grappled with a modern world that was both accelerating and enervating. This is a fresh interpretation of a period that has long fascinated historians of Australia for its brew of nationalism, radicalism, utopianism and the occult, but it will interest anyone curious about how modern life reshaped imaginative possibilities at the same time as it generated new anxieties. This is a ground-breaking cultural history that invites us to rethink a formative era.” —Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, The Australian National University, Australia

From the Publisher