Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 sta
Trade ReviewAt 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 *
Table of ContentsList 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
