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As we enter a new century, to say nothing of a new millenium, there is an urge to review and assess the previous one. In the case of art and literature at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that seems almost an imperative. The turn of the 15th, 16th and 18th centuries had seen revolutions in literature and the arts. Whether these were stimulated by the approach of a new century is hard to say and need not detain us. Suffice it to say, the end of the 19th century — they even thought up a name for it (fin de siècle) — saw revolutions in the arts and literature the likes and scope of which had never been seen before. These revolutionary changes threatened the very notion of art itself, to say nothing of the individual arts and artistic literature. It baffled the general public, even the artistically educated public; academicians were contemptuous and dismissive; and, for the most part, the critics were as baffled as the public. This state of affairs persisted to some degree until the 1960's when the mid-century American artistic revolutions overshadowed the now extenuated earlier ones.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_23

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