By Valerie Fehlbaum
Le mercredi de 12h30 à 13h45, les 20 septembre, 4 et 18 octobre, 1er, 15 et 29 novembre, 13 décembre 2023 et les 10 et 24 janvier, 7 et 28 février, 13 et 27 mars, 17 avril 2024
After obtaining her B.A. at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, Valerie Fehlbaum moved to Switzerland where she taught English as a Foreign Language for a few years before joining the English Department at the University of Geneva. She then went on to obtain an M.A. in Gender Studies and a Ph.D. on the New Woman at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Her subsequent monograph on Ella Hepworth Dixon was initially published by Ashgate in 2005, and republished in paperback by Taylor & Francis in 2019. She has also lectured at the University of Neuchâtel, and tutored with the Open University.
Otherwise known as ‘The Naughty Nineties’ or, worse, ‘La Fin de Siècle’ with the recourse to French suggesting the very depths of depravity, the last decade of the nineteenth century, coinciding as it did with the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign, seemed to herald, for some at least, the end of civilisation as they perceived it. Abroad, the Empire was showing serious signs of crumbling, and at home social conventions were being challenged as never before.
Although the period is now largely associated with Oscar Wilde, this atelier will examine in detail the works of various other poets, dramatists and writers of fiction, and attempt to evaluate the extent to which such fears of decadence and degeneration were justified.
Texts will include a selection of poetry by, for example, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Symons, and W.B. Yeats, Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw, and some short fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Ella Hepworth Dixon, amongst others.