Aesthetic Afterlives

Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty

AvAndrew Eastham

Häftad, Engelska, 2013

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Beskrivning

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism's cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the ‘new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2013-04-25
Mått:156 x 234 x 15 mm
Vikt:381 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:272
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:9781472512109

Utforska kategorier

Filosofiska discipliner inom Filosofi och religion
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
Litteraturteori inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

Andrew Eastham is a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Recensioner i media

Aesthetic Afterlives traces the lineage of Paterian aesthetics from its incandescent impact within English fin de siècle culture to its spectral “afterimage” in modernist and postmodernist writing […] Ambitious in scope, broadly researched and elaborately (if densely) argued, Eastham’s book will prove of immense use to scholars anxious to reanimate an alternative line of influence in the history of literary modernity.

Innehållsförteckning

List of Abbreviations \ Introduction \ 1. Walter Pater'sAcoustic Space: ‘The School of Giorgione', Dionysian Anders-streben, andthe Politics of Soundscape \ 2. Aesthetic Vampirism: The Concept of Irony inthe Work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee \ 3. ‘Master of Irony':Henry James, Transatlantic Bildung and the Critique ofAestheticism \ 4. Irony's Turn: The Redress of Aestheticism in KatherineMansfield's Notebooks and Stories \ 5. Sacrificing Aestheticism: The Dialecticof Modernity and the Ends of Beauty in D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Womenin Love \ 6. Aristocracies of Mourning: The Reconsecration of Aestheticismin Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited \ 7. Sublime Ironies: TheRemainders of Romanticism in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy and Krapp's Last Tape\ 8. Inoperative Ironies: Jamesian Aestheticism and Post-modern Culture in AlanHollinghurst's The Line of Beauty \ 9. The Aesthetic Afterlives of MrW.P. : Reanimating Pater in Twenty-first-Century Fiction \ Notes \ Works Cited\ Index