Fin-de-Siècle Splendor

Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1848-1911 is a 1997 non-fiction book by David Der-Wei Wang, published by Stanford University Press. David Wang's thesis is that modernity was already beginning to appear in fiction published in the late Qing Dynasty of China, defined by Wang as beginning in 1849, around the start of the Taiping Rebellion, rather than only appearing after the Qing Dynasty concluded in 1912. This is the first English-language full-length book written by a single author that surveyed late Qing Dynasty fiction.

Robert Hegel of Washington University in St. Louis stated that the book focuses on fiction "generally despised as backward, decadent, and certainly not modern" and that while it does not attempt to subvert the understanding of May Fourth Movement-era works itself, Wang argues that there were multiple new literary forms pursued in the post-Taiping era, not just intentionally Westernized writing. Therefore, according to Hegel, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor is "a revisionist study of the first order".

Background

The title "Fin-de-Siècle Splendor" refers to a renewal of society as well as decadence and loss of previous values that Wang argued appeared in both Chinese and European literary societies of that time period.

At the time Wang worked at Columbia University as a professor of Chinese literature.

Wang defined the start of the "late Qing Dynasty" as beginning in 1849, around the Taiping Rebellion, while scholarly consensus as of the late 1990s considered 1890, characterized by the effects of the First Sino-Japanese War, as the beginning of the late Qing dynasty in terms of intellectual developments. Prior works produced in China and outside of China which discuss late Qing literature use 1900-1910 as their focus.