Aestheticism
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0002
- LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011
- LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0002
Introduction
Aestheticism can be defined broadly as the elevation of taste and the pursuit of beauty as chief principles in art and in life. In the context of British literature there is considerable controversy about when and where aestheticism occurs; but a line can be traced from the art criticism of John Ruskin in the 1850s, through the artists and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the writings of Walter Pater, to the works of Oscar Wilde and the flowering of decadent poetry of the 1890s. The movement drew upon the formula of “l’art pour l’art”—art for art’s sake—articulated most memorably by the French novelist Théophile Gautier in his 1836 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was one of a number of French writers and artists of the period who argued that art should be evaluated with reference to its own criteria. In aestheticism the subjective view of beauty becomes the primary means of judging value: when considering whether a poem or a painting is good, aestheticism merely asks if it is beautiful or meaningful as a work of art in itself. This forms a stark contrast to the long-standing custom of judging art and literature either on the basis of the moral lessons it might teach to readers or viewers (its social usefulness) or in terms of its correspondence to real life (its realism). It is this refusal to acknowledge the primacy of morality within art that made aestheticism such a controversial movement from the mid 19th century onward: its proponents were the subjects of vituperative attacks from mainstream writers and critics and were consistently satirized throughout this period. The category of aestheticism is a notoriously slippery one and can overlap with and encompass the categories of Pre-Raphaelitism, decadence, symbolism, and early modernism. The section Defining Aestheticism thus aims to orient readers in this controversy before moving on to examine the many spheres in which studies in aestheticism have expanded at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries: from the improvement of life of the urban working classes to the literary modernism that so strenuously disavowed its debt to the aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s.
General Overviews
For the purpose of clarity and orientation, this bibliography divides aestheticism into two distinct historical phases, the first of which includes Pre-Raphaelitism and the aesthetic movement, c. 1850–1880, and the second of which includes aestheticism and decadence, c. 1870–1910.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Empire
- Actresses
- Adventure Literature
- Aestheticism
- Affect
- Allen, Grant
- Arnold, Matthew
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Atheism and Secularization
- Australia
- Autobiography
- Barnes, William
- Barrett Browning, Elizabeth
- Blind, Mathilde
- Boucicault, Dion
- Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
- Britain in Latin America
- Brontë, Anne
- Brontë, Charlotte
- Brontë, Emily
- Broughton, Rhoda
- Browning, Robert
- Burton, Richard Francis
- Butler, Samuel
- Caird, Mona
- Caribbean/West Indies
- Carlyle, Thomas
- Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
- Chartism
- Childhood in Victorian Literature
- Children's Literature
- Christian Church, The
- City, The
- Class
- Classical Antiquity
- Clough, Arthur Hugh
- Cobbe, Frances Power
- Collins, Wilkie
- Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
- Conrad, Joseph
- Contagion
- Copyright
- Corelli, Marie
- Crime and Punishment
- Crimean War, The
- Culture, Visual
- Dandy, The
- Darwinism
- Death
- Decadence
- Dickens, Charles
- Dictionaries
- Disraeli, Benjamin
- Domesticity
- Dowson, Ernest
- Du Maurier, George
- Ecology in Victorian Literature
- Education
- Eliot, George
- Emigration and Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Settler...
- Epic Tradition, The
- Eugene Lee-Hamilton
- Evangelicalism
- Fairy Tales and Folklore
- Feminism
- Fiction, Detective
- Fiction, Sensation
- Field, Michael
- Fin de Siècle
- FitzGerald, Edward
- Flora Annie Steel
- Food and Drink
- France
- Gardens
- Gaskell, Elizabeth
- Gender
- Geology
- Gosse, Edmund
- Great Exhibition, The, 1851
- Haggard, H. Rider
- Hardy, Thomas
- Historical Novel, The
- Homosexuality
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley
- Illustration
- Ireland
- James, Henry
- Journalism
- Keble, John
- Kingsley, Charles
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Lang, Andrew
- Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
- Lear, Edward
- Lee, Vernon
- Levy, Amy
- Life Writing
- Literacy
- Livingstone, David
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington
- Machines
- Maritime
- Marryat, Florence
- Martineau, Harriet
- Masculinity
- Material Culture
- Mayhew, Henry and the Mayhew Brothers
- Medicine
- Melodrama
- Meredith, George
- Mill, John Stuart
- Missions and the British and Irish Churches: 1701–c.1900
- Mobility
- Monologue, Dramatic
- Morris, William
- Museums
- Myth and Victorian Literature
- National Identity
- Neo-Victorianism
- New Woman, The
- Newgate Novel, The
- Newman, John Henry
- Oliphant, Margaret
- Orientalism
- Ouida
- Owen, Richard (Victorian Naturalist)
- Oxford Movement, The
- Pantomime
- Pastoral in Victorian Literature
- Pater, Walter Horatio
- Periodical Press, The
- Photography
- Psychology
- Publishing
- Race
- Raphaelitism, Pre-
- Reade, Charles
- Reading Practices
- Realism
- Reynolds, G. W. M.
- Rhymers' Club
- Robins, Elizabeth
- Rossetti, Christina
- Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
- Ruskin, John
- Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White)
- Rymer, James Malcolm
- Satire
- Schreiner, Olive
- Science
- Science Fiction
- Scotland and Scottish Literature
- Seacole, Mary
- Sentimentality
- Serialization
- Sexual Reproduction
- Sexual Violence
- Sexuality
- Silver Fork Novel (Fashionable Novel)
- Sincerity
- Slavery and Antislavery
- Slum Fiction
- Slumming
- Socialism and Labor
- Social-Problem Novel
- Sonnet
- Stevenson, Robert Louis
- Stoker, Bram
- Supernatural, The
- Swinburne, A.C.
- Symonds, John Addington
- Technologies of Publishing
- Technology
- Tennyson, Alfred
- Thackeray, William Makepeace
- The Body
- The Ghost Story
- Thomson, James (B.V.)
- Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth
- Travel Writing
- Trollope, Anthony
- Trollope, Frances
- Tyndall, John
- Unitarianism
- Verse, Devotional
- Victorian Literature and Translation
- Ward, Mary
- Webster, Julia Augusta
- Wells, H. G.
- Whiteness in Victorian Literature
- Wilde, Oscar
- Women's Education
- Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry Wood)
- Work, The Gospel of
- Writing Practices
- Yonge, Charlotte
- Zangwill, Israel