The Fin de Sicle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914

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This book explores the fin de sicle, 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 sicle 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 sicle 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 sicle was significant for the making of modern Australia, and demonstrating the impact Australian fin de sicle lives had on the transnational and global movements of the era, Mark Hearn traces the turbulent nature of the fin de sicle imagination in Australia, and its response to these dynamic forces.

Reviews

At last, the Australian experience of the extraordinarily volatile period known as the fin de sicle 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-Sicle 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 sicle puzzle: a settler colonial site that shows how imperial forces drove many of the political and cultural crises of these crucial decades. Hearns 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 sicle 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 *

Author Bio

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.