Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

Elaine Showalter has argued that the fin de siècle abounded with “histories which describe deviance, rebellion, and the abnormal. Like Freud’s accounts of hysterical patients, they are fragmented, out of chronological sequence, contradictory, and incoherent” (1990, 18). On the cusp of the twentieth century, forms of sexual deviance embodied in the New Woman, the dandy, and the androgyne threatened the fragmentation of everything from the nuclear family, the unitary ego, the bourgeois novel, and the positivist notion of historical progress. 

The fin de siècle’s disruptive fragmentation emerged, importantly, against the ideals of symmetry and wholeness that dominated the Neoclassical aesthetics of the early nineteenth century. From Walter Pater and Vernon Lee’s theorization of the fragmentary nature of sense perception to the literally fragmented artistic identity of Michael Field, from the fragmentary technique of neo-impressionist and pointillist painting to the aesthetics of ruination and decay in decadence, fin de siècle culture abounded with treatments of aesthetic, epistemological, historical, psychological, and sexual fragmentation. More than a mere regurgitation of the Romantic cult of the ruin or a protozoic predecessor to Modernist experimentation, fin de siècle fragmentation, with its constitutive entanglements with gender and sexuality, represents an aesthetic unto itself.

In this issue, we are interested in the ways in which the fragment’s complex gender and sexual signification defines the long, enigmatic 1890s—rhetorically, aesthetically, literarily, epistemologically, and materially. Potential topics may include: 

• Aesthetics of Fragmentation - “Neo-romantic” and “proto-modernist” women writers; impressionist and neo-impressionist painters; anonymous, pseudonymous, and collective writers; poetic fragments and fractured literary forms; aesthetic synthesis in women’s writing

• Fragmentation and Wholeness: Gender and totality; domestic rupture; psychological breakdown; the supernatural and the natural; gender and geopolitical networks

• Fragments and Worlds: Gender and landscape; fragmentation and materialisms; navigating fractured environments; gender and ruins; women performing or living under ecological extraction

• Bodily Imaginaries - Theories of sexual difference; disability and gender; gendered divisions of labor; physical intimacy and alienation; individual parts in lived environments

• Epistemology - Gendered discourses of classification; theories of discovery and rediscovery; female practitioners and subjects of scientific research; gender and modern archaeology

Articles should be 5000-8000 words. Submissions will be due on January 5th, 2027. Decisions will be sent by March 15th, 2027 and any revisions will be due back by May 1st, 2027. Please send submissions to Emily Waller Singeisen (esing@unc.edu) and Ryan Carroll (rcarroll@unc.edu).