Aestheticism
Aestheticism is an artistic movement that emerged in the late 19th century, emphasizing the pursuit of beauty and the aesthetic experience in literature and other art forms. It prioritizes the sensory and emotional aspects of art over moral or social messages, often celebrating art for art's sake. Aestheticism is characterized by its focus on decadence, refined style, and the cultivation of individual sensibility.
6 Key excerpts on "Aestheticism"
eBook - ePub- R. V. Johnson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Aspects of Aestheticism In studying Victorian literature, we soon meet with references to ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘the aesthetic movement’, ‘Aestheticism’, ‘the aesthetes’. We thus gather that in the later nineteenth century there appeared a body of people who distinguished themselves by the importance they attached to literature and the fine arts and to beauty generally; and that they were often regarded with disapproval by their fellow-citizens. We may see examples of Du Maurier’s contemporary cartoons in Punch, where the aesthete figures as an affected young gentleman with long hair, velveteen jacket and knickerbockers, attended by admiring, languidly ethereal young ladies. And the name that probably most readily comes to most people’s minds – if only because it has a certain facetious notoriety in modern English folk-lore – is that of Oscar Wilde. When, however, we attempt a more precise understanding of ‘Aestheticism’, ‘art for art’s sake’, and related terms, the picture blurs. When we try to pin them down, the terms become oddly elusive. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was a useful battle-cry for artists and critics claiming freedom of artistic expression; but, logically, it becomes meaningful, only if we can answer the question, ‘What is art?’ The aesthetic movement is, historically, a rather obscure phenomenon, since it is difficult to say of whom it ever consisted – apart from Oscar Wilde himself. (And Wilde was less important, as an originator of ideas, than his fame suggests.) Did there, in fact, ever exist anything sufficiently coherent and clearly defined to merit being called a movement at all? Again, an aesthete is often defined as somebody who appreciates beauty; but aesthetes, in this broad sense, have obviously existed before and since the nineteenth century. What was so special about ‘the Aesthetes’? As for the word, ‘Aestheticism’: this is used to denote different features of nineteenth-century culture...
eBook - ePub- Sara Upstone(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...1 Aestheticism The beginnings of literary theory are often identified as an early twentieth-century development, occurring at the same time as the movements that began to consciously name and define literary and artistic production. Guides to literary theory often begin with formalism: a field of literary criticism that sprang up alongside the movement towards self-conscious artistic definition. However, there was a tradition preceding this of attempting to theorize approaches to thinking about literature within the context of wider debates surrounding artistic production. Certainly, we might see Romanticism as one such movement. We could also refer to the metaphysical poetry movement, or transcendentalism, as other examples. We are going to begin, however, not with these but with perhaps a less familiar term that is associated with the nineteenth century – and that is Aestheticism. It is often neglected in accounts of literary theory, but it haunts the twentieth-century movements that follow, particularly modernism and, as we shall see at the end of the chapter, it has seen a twenty-first-century resurgence. The Pre-Raphaelites Aestheticism has its roots in the Romantic ideas of John Keats (1795–1821), the mid-nineteenth-century writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Unlike the American transcendentalist movement or the largely English metaphysical poetry and Pre-Raphaelite traditions, Aestheticism can be seen to define thinking about literature beyond national literary identities. Its significance comes, in particular, in the ways in which it defined the role of art in relation to society...
- Josephine Guy, Ian Small(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Modern critics, however, have viewed the Aesthetic Movement’s association of literary and sexual freedom more positively. They have, for example, seen continuities between Aestheticism’s concern with style and the formal experimentation found in Modernist writing. (In the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15) by James Joyce Stephen Dedalus’s intellectual and sexual emancipation from the constraints of the Catholic church and life in Dublin are partly troped through a Paterian-sounding endorsement of art, understood as ‘the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end’.) They have also elaborated more subtle and complex understandings of the sexual politics of Aestheticism (Dellamora 1990; Denisoff 2006). Moreover, this recognition of Aestheticism as a literary or cultural vanguard (rather than, as its contemporary detractors saw it, simply a fad) has in recent years given shape to a question, most neatly posed by Talia Schaffer: ‘Who were aesthetic writers, and what texts count as aesthetic?’ (Schaffer 2000: 1). As we noted earlier, when literary and cultural historians first began to investigate the Aesthetic Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s the ‘exponents’ of Aestheticism, as R. V. Johnson had termed them, were all male (Johnson 1969). By contrast, feminist critics like Schaffer have sought to extend the label Aesthetic to a number of late nineteenth-century women writers, whom she terms the ‘forgotten female aesthetes’. To this end, Schaffer has argued for a much ‘looser’ definition of Aestheticism, in which ‘love of children and nature’ and the ‘employment of epigrams and archaisms for the purpose of camouflaging forbidden topics’ become sufficient conditions to group with the familiar Wilde and Pater figures such as Alice Meynell (1847–1922), Rosamund Marriott Watson (who wrote under the pseudonym Graham Thomson, 1860–1911) and E...
eBook - ePubKant, Kantianism, and Idealism
The Origins of Continental Philosophy
- Thomas Nenon(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The very essence of arts is semblance and semblance is aesthetic only if it is “honest (expressly renounces all claims to reality) and autonomous (dispenses with all support from reality)” (Letter 26). To the extent that aesthetic semblance takes hold for individuals or whole peoples, it performs the essential, humanizing task of demarcating and securing the distinctiveness of truth and morality. On the final pages of the Letters, Schiller draws the political consequences of his account as he introduces the notion of “the realm of aesthetic semblance” or the “aesthetic state” (ästhetischer Staat). Beauty’s capacity to transform sexual desire into love also signals its capacity to resolve competing desires in society at large. Only in an aesthetic state can we confront each other, not as enforcers of our respective rights (“the fearful kingdom of forces”) or as executors of our wills (“the sacred kingdom of laws”), but as free and equal citizens: “the third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance” (Letter 27). Modernity and the promise of poetry Schiller’s final major work in aesthetics, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96) contrasts the naturalness of naive poets, typified by ancient writers such as Homer, with the more self-conscious and, in this sense “sentimental” style typical of modern writers such as Ariosto. In this somewhat idiosyncratic use of the terms, “naive” signifies a direct, not an unsophisticated manner of writing; “sentimental” does not mean mawkish but self-reflective. Whereas the naive style is straightforward with an air of objectivity and without any intrusion by the author, the sentimental poets cannot refrain from introducing their own subjective feelings and opinions into the writing. Schiller puts the difference in terms of naturalness (“The poet either is nature or will seek it...
- Benedetto Croce(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...The work is on Herbartian lines, and is remarkable for solid research and lucid exposition, although the erroneous point of view and neglect of all æsthetic movement other than Græco-Roman or German are grave defects; besides, it is now sixty years out of date. Less solid and more compilatory in nature, whilst retaining all the defects of the foregoing, is the history by Max Schasler, Kritische Geschichte der Ästhetik, Berlin, 1872, divided into three books treating of ancient Æsthetic and that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author belongs to the Hegelian school and conceives his history as a propædeutic to theory, "in order, that is, to attain a supreme principle for the construction of a new system"; he schematizes the material of facts for each period into three grades of Æsthetic of sensation (Empfindungsurtheil,) of intellect (Verstandsurtheil) and of reason (Vernunfturtheil.) English literature has Bernard Bosanquet's History of Æsthetics, London, 1892; a sober and well-arranged work, written from an eclectic point of view between the Æsthetic of content and the Æsthetic of form. The author, however, is wrong in believing he has passed over "no writer of the first rank"; he has passed over not only writers but some important movements of ideas, and in general he shows insufficient knowledge of the literature of the Latin races. Another general history of Æsthetic in English is the first volume of The Philosophy of the Beautiful, being Outlines of the History of Æsthetics, by William Knight, London, Murray, 1895: it consists mainly of a rich collection of extracts and abridgements of ancient and modern books treating of Æsthetic. In this respect the most noteworthy chapters are those on Holland, Great Britain and America (10-13); the second volume, published in 1898, has in an appendix, pp. 251-281, notices upon Æsthetic in Russia and Denmark...
eBook - ePub- Severin Schroeder, Severin Schroeder(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...These works, while in many ways great, are clearly not beautiful in any straightforward sense, and are more appropriately classified under Nietzsche’s label of ‘interesting ugliness.’ 6 MacCarthy notices the difficulty with novels, and tries to deal with it by the ad hoc device of claiming them to be ‘bastard’ works of art, but in fact the trouble is much more wide ranging, and requires his theory to be rejected altogether. I suspect that what have been dubbed ‘no-truth’ theories of art are nourished by a too narrow a conception of the aesthetic and too narrow a conception of knowledge. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the reasons why some philosophers and critics find the cognitive and aesthetic impulses in tension with one another, and to provide an account of the aesthetic attitude and literary knowledge which shows that the alleged tension is only apparent. In my view, the ability to impart knowledge can sometimes be a part, and an important part, of a work’s aesthetic quality. I hope that what follows has a general application to all the representational arts, but I shall largely restrict my discussion to literature because that has always been the main focus of debate. And my discussion of literature will largely focus on fiction because that is where the most distinctive features of literary knowledge can best be seen. The first prerequisite for showing that the alleged tension between curiosity and aesthetic interest is only apparent, is to clarify the nature of aesthetic interest. 7 The aesthetic attitude is a mode of attention to an object of sight, hearing or – to a lesser extent – touch. There are two kinds of attention: willed and unwilled. In the former case my attention is an action; it is something I do for a reason. Thus I may look at a picture to try to discover whether the castle it represents had a portcullis, or whether the canvas is large enough to cover my wall safe, or whether the artist who painted it was a Mason...
