The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

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The proposed research will lead to a book entitled The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English 'Fin de Siècle', as well as to two workshops and an international conference designed to explore cosmopolitanism within and beyond the specific historical context of the 1890s.Throughout, I aim to show that knowing how cosmopolitanism was understood in the 1890s can enhance our understanding of, and participation in, the debates around national identity and globalisation that are current in our own day. Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for 'world citizenship', offers a radical alternative to the ideology of nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a global community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. The 1890s witnessed a widespread public debate on cosmopolitanism: in Britain and throughout Europe, this period saw a clash between ideologies of trans-national cooperation and universalism, partly promoted by modern transport and communication technologies, and the rising nationalism that would culminate in the First World War. My research will show that the 1890s controversy around cosmopolitanism, largely uncharted so far, is a shaping influence on the literary culture of this decade which has long been recognised as a crucial turning point in literary history. Promoters of literary cosmopolitanism questioned the supposedly fundamental link between literature, national identity, and national language: they deliberately sought out the strange and foreign in their works in order to create new ways of reading and writing that crossed boundaries between languages and literary genres as much as between different nations. These practices were denounced as politically and morally suspect by the detractors of cosmopolitanism, who stressed the responsibilities of literature towards local communities and the nation. I aim to show that a nuanced and historically-accurate understanding of the debate on cosmopolitanism transforms our understanding of the literary culture of the fin de siècle, allowing us to move beyond the categories of decadence, impressionism, and symbolism that have dominated the critical tradition. In order to do so, I concentrate on authors who embrace the cosmopolitan ideal but are also careful to define what is at stake in the controversy surrounding it. My monograph will therefore be divided into five chapters that examine, respectively: Oscar Wilde; George Egerton (Mary Dunne Bright); Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé); John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis; and Henry James. Drawing mainly on articles in the periodical press, the introduction will aim to reconstruct the meaning and associations of the term 'cosmopolitanism' for readers in the 1890s, teasing out its literary implications; while the conclusion will relate the 1890s debate on cosmopolitanism to our current discussion about global/local identities. My case studies have been chosen in order to break down existing distinctions between canonical and marginal writers, 'high' and popular literature, male and female authorship. I will show that the debate on cosmopolitanism involved authors and readerships with very different aesthetic and political agendas. Each chapter draws both on published and archival material in order to piece together literary networks that connect English works from this period with a range of French, Scandinavian, Italian, and German sources. A particularly original aspect of my approach is the emphasis on gender: I argue that politically and socially marginalised groups such as women and homosexual men were drawn to the cosmopolitan ideal as a utopian path towards artistic and personal freedom; and conversely, that cosmopolitanism, with its attack on traditional models of national identity, generated new ways of understanding the body, gender, and sexual identities.