Penguin Modern Classics: 1900 Millenial Anthologies

At the turn of the nineteenth century, just like today, many people were terrified - or thrilled - by the seemingly unstoppable progress of science, wrestling with questions of sexual identity, turning away from traditional religions or taking refuge in spiritualism, the paranormal and 'new age' philosophies. This selection of writings from the four decades around 1900 brings together newspaper cuttings, poetry and pulp fiction, scientific polemic and sexological speculation, alongside classic texts by Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Wells, Dickens and Ibsen, Ruskin and Zola. Vividly illuminating both the similarities and the differences between millennial and fin-de-siecle anxieties, it forces us to look again at the progress we have made (or failed to make) in the last hundred years.
'Jay and Neve have done a great service in restoring a sense of ~inities with those culturally tumultuous decades.'
Roy Porter