Abstract
One reason, surely, why there was a fin de siècle at all is because the only end in sight was calendrical. The cataclysmic possibilities of the mid-century passed by, and a strong discourse of social evolution seemed to have all the terms of debate within its grasp. The Commune left Third Republican France hardly less bourgeois than the Second Empire; the Civil War did not make reconstructed America any more egalitarian; Reform Acts did not damage the class fences of Britain, and Prussia had Bismarck. In the immediate perspective of the nervous eighties Britain, which promised some turmoil in mid-decade, went through the pain barrier of a mass strike without the power structure falling apart, and Americans felt more threatened by ‘new fortunes’ than ‘anarchists’. The dominant capitalist structure must have looked as though it was here to stay: history, one might have thought in 1890 as well as 1990, was over.
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Notes
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© 1992 John Goode
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Goode, J. (1992). Writing Beyond the End. In: Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22421-0_2
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