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Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 pp 47–92Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Weird Fin-De-Siècle and After

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic ((PAGO))

Abstract

Machin explores the wider literary field of the period and identifies the emergence of the ‘high phase’ of weird fiction, before focusing on two critical frames in order to understand this emergence: the development of the short story and the literary Decadence of the fin de siècle. He also introduces some of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically the application of Bourdieu’s notions of distinction to fields of cultural production, which serves throughout the project as a theoretical tool used to approach issues relating to high and low art, literariness, and canonicity. Finally, Machin considers the notion of an Edwardian weird, looking at some relevant texts by Walter de la Mare, Oliver Onions, and others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although the specific context for this controversy was a new one, this fundamental argument over whether literature was an art or a trade was not. John Gross, for example, writes of Thackeray’s contempt for Bulwer’s and Dickens’s Guild of Literature and Art launched in 1851. Thackeray objected that ‘a lot of humbug was talked about the special privileges of genius, Grub Street in the old sense had disappeared, literature was a trade like any other, etcetera’ (Gross 1973, 32).

  2. 2.

    The apparent lack of any contemporary newspaper coverage of the incident at Vigo Street raises at least a question mark over the actual size of this ‘mob’.

  3. 3.

    Hereafter I shall abbreviate the 1894 Keynotes book The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light to The Great God Pan (italicized), differentiating it from its constituent story ‘The Great God Pan’.

  4. 4.

    This is an excerpt from a passage in which Gross is sketching Frederic Harrison’s ‘anxiety of contamination’ from the 1870s onwards.

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  1. Royal College of Art, London, UK

    James Machin

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Machin, J. (2018). The Weird Fin-De-Siècle and After. In: Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90527-3_2

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