Masks Unmasked: A Journey Through Fin-de-siècle Europe

In her monograph Fragments, Genius and Madness. Masks and Mask-Making in the fin-de-siècle Imagination (2021), Elisa Segnini leads her readers on a journey through fin-de-siècle Europe with one extra stop in Japan. The universe unveiled by Segnini is populated by uncanny mask makers, men in drag, grotesque masquerades, deathly plaster casts, gruesome masks of exceptional men, criminals, and deviants. Masks, portraits, mirrors, busts, severed heads conflate into a picture of the complex ethos of the fin de siècle. This elegant volume, published by Legenda as part of the series Studies in Comparative Literature, is Segnini’s first monograph and a result of her research on the intersections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, theatre, and visual arts. By reading works of art originating in different countries, cultures and media in light of medico-legal discourses, Segnini establishes new connections, innovative patterns and interpretative models that complicate further, and in a positive way, the current picture of fin-de-siècle culture.