This seminar will explore the panorama of British and Continental fiction, poetry, and drama from about 1880 to 1905, a period of enormous innovation in literary form and expression. We will study the major schools and movements of the fin de siècle - symbolism, naturalism, aestheticism, decadence - while emphasizing how the major writers of the period transformed 19th-century conventions into a new modernist vocabulary. We will also consider the literature of these years alongside contemporaneous experimentation in the visual arts. |