Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Introduction: Reflections on the Relationship between Art and Life in Aestheticism....Pages 1-21
Front Matter....Pages 23-23
The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity....Pages 25-41
Rossetti’s Aesthetically Saturated Readings: Art’s De-Humanizing Power....Pages 42-61
Dickens À La Carte: Aesthetic Victualism and the Invigoration of the Artist in Huysmans’s Against Nature....Pages 62-75
Front Matter....Pages 77-77
Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Concept of Irony....Pages 79-95
The De-Humanization of the Artistic Receptor: The George Circle’s Rejection of Paterian Aestheticism....Pages 96-108
Art for the Body’s Sake: Nietzsche’s Physical Aestheticism....Pages 109-121
Front Matter....Pages 123-123
From “God of the Creation” to “Hangman God”: Joyce’s Reassessment of Aestheticism....Pages 125-138
The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics....Pages 139-158
On the Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem—and Me....Pages 159-170
Front Matter....Pages 171-171
Beauty be Damned: On Why Adorno Valorizes Carrion, Stench, and Putrefaction....Pages 173-188
“This temptation to be undone …” Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style....Pages 189-207
Art for Heart’s Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser....Pages 208-231
Back Matter....Pages 232-240