The end-of-century experience is generating intense interest among contemporary critics. This collection of essays scrutinizes ways in which current conflicts of race, class and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de siecle. The construction of masculinities, feminism and empire, Yeats and Ireland, the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, socialism, psychoanalysis, and the relationship between nascent modernism and postmodernism are all addressed in this radical collaborative venture.