The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914

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 *