Becoming Modern: English Identity at the End of an Age

Title

Becoming Modern: English Identity at the End of an Age

Description

Dr. Jessica Hower
Dr. Kimberly Smith
Dr. Melissa Byrnes

Creator

Fleming, Jennifer

Date

2016-05-18

Date Available

2016-05-18

Date Issued

2016

uri

https://collections.southwestern.edu/s/suscholar/item/84

Abstract

The Victorians have a huge hold on our imaginations. Today we recognize them as one of the first fully modern societies, something which many of their best thinkers were happy to attribute to themselves. However, modernity for the Victorian was not without its problems. First, being modern is fundamentally about being future oriented. Second, political and cultural modernity as understood at the fin-de-sicle had a distinctly continental European character. For an insular society that prided itself on its provincial past, becoming modern was no easy task. My research, combining approaches borrowed from various disciplines within the humanities—historiography, art history, literary theory—has been dedicated to untangling the complicated mindset of the Late Victorians. Emphasizing the different ways in which societies construct themselves, whether through history, art, or politics, I bring to back to life a deeply self-conscious people who were at times uncomfortably aware of what it meant to live at a turning point in history. Showing remarkable ingenuity, the Late Victorians cobbled together a kind of modernity that embraced English singularity while still being a part of a global conversation, rooted in the past while future looking. In many ways we have inherited their uneasiness with modernity, meaning they have much to teach us about how to live in our own alienating world.

Language

English

Subject

Great Britain

English Identity

Victorian Studies

English Art

English Socialism

Historiography

Victorian Historians

Research Subject Categories::HUMANITIES and RELIGION::History and philosophy subjects::History subjects::History

Research Subject Categories::HUMANITIES and RELIGION::Aesthetic subjects::Art

19th Century

Type

Thesis