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This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.
First published in 1969, this work explores aestheticism and its relationship with literature. After defining the term and examining the unique qualities of ‘the Aesthetes’, the book provides an overview of the literary movement from its emergence to its apotheosis in the 1890s. This book will be of particular interest to those studying 19th Century literature.
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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The interest in aesthetics in Philosophy, Literary and Cultural Studies is growing rapidly. 'The new aestheticism' contains exemplary essays by key practitioners in these fields which demonstrate the importance of this area of enquiry.
A reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory. Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose. Works by these queer artists have rarely been taken seriously as contributions to the theories of sexuality or aesthetics. But in Before Queer Theory, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism deploys its "art for art's sake" rhetoric to establish a nascent sense of sexual identity and community. Friedman makes the case for a claim rarely articulated in either Victorian or modern culture: that intellectually, creatively, and ethically, being qu...
Based on close readings of five Victorian novels, Hallum presents an original study of the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement. She uses the texts to trace the development of aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender.
'On Form' assesses both the legacy of Victorian aestheticism and the nature of the literary. It tracks the development of the world 'form' since the Romantics and offers readings of, among others, Tennyson, Yeats and Plath. Original readings of poetry are combined with a powerful argument about the nature of aesthetic pleasure.
This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.
Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life is a dynamic history of literary aestheticism from the eighteenth century to academic deconstruction in our own time. Gene H. Bell-Villada examines an enormous range of writings by critics, philosophers, and writers from Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Uniting all is his conviction that "there are concrete social, economic, political, and cultural reasons for the emergence, growth, diffusion, and triumph of l'art pour l'art over the past two centuries." Bell-Villada begins by considering how such thinkers as Shaftesbury, Kant, and Schiller described beauty as a phenomenon to be weighed not in isolation from other aspects of our existence but...
A collection of essays on the women novelists, poets, fiction writers, essayists and critics who played a central and long-forgotten role in the history of aestheticism. It demonstrates how aestheticism offered people a set of concepts and a vocabulary for addressing issues such as gender.