Introduction

The fin-de-Siècle has most often been studied as a Western phenomenon and cast as a distinct yet amorphous interval spanning late "Victorianism" and early "Modernism". First Wave interpreters claimed that the fin-de-Siècle expressed a contradictory Zeitgeist peculiar to its chronological moment: the "Spirit of the Time" emphasized both cultural decline and spiritual rebirth. The Second Wave of scholarship after the war tended to confirm this loose periodization of the fin de Siècle from 1870 to 1914, with some accounts plumping for its origins in the 1880s, and a few holding firm for the 1890s. The Third Wave investigations of the fin de Siècle establish that confrontations and collaborations between the traditional and the modern, the particular and the global, were emblematic of the world between 1870 and 1914: yet another instance of the period’s complementary nature. This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.