ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life. It focuses on the foundation of human experience, which is necessarily grounded in these dimensions. While this transformation began in Europe and America, it had global implications. The chapter discusses a new sense of simultaneity, an acceleration of the pace of life, and a leveling of spatial hierarchies. The new sense of time was manifest in modes of past, present, and future and was evinced in changes from material developments in technology and social organization to innovations in painting and the novel. The physical space of nineteenth-century physics as well as everyday life is that of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, based on two fundamental ideas, that there is only one space and that it is empty and inert.
