Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, cosmopolitanism offers a radical alternative to identities and cultural practices built on the idea of the nation: cosmopolitans imagine themselves instead as part of a global community that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries. This book argues that fin-de-siècle writing in English witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. It offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a field of controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light a variety of literary responses. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness. It investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents English-language literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.

Reclaiming provincialism

“…(Dainotto, 1996: 496). This rather inflexible binaristic characterization, which the present article opposes, is haunted by the stark centre/periphery dichotomy that gained traction in nineteenth-century Europe (Shils, 1975), with the provincialsupposedly backwards and narrow-mindedas the opposite of the cosmopolitan, which in fact had negative connotations before taking on the sense of forward-looking and worldly (Chattopadhyay, 2012;Evangelista, 2021).…”

Italian ghetto stories: Toward a transnational literary history

“…27. Rochelson (2015) and Evangelista (2021) have both read Zangwill's work set in Italy as part of his efforts to construct a more cosmopolitan image for himself: 'Zangwill equally sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a commentator not just Jewish, but cosmopolitan and modern' (Rochelson, 2015: 138). 28.…”

“…He drowns himself in a canal. 10 Zangwill's Chad Gadya has been analyzed as representing modernity and western Jewish identity, as well as playing a significant part in Zangwill's developing sense of self (Baumgarten, 2015;Evangelista, 2021;Rochelson, 2015).…”