The introduction defines and historicizes aestheticism and evolutionism, stressing their concurrent emergence in Britain in the 1850s. The introduction then lays out the book’s central claims, provides an accessible review of relevant scholarship on both aestheticism and the history of Victorian science, and situates the project within this broader field. In the course of this overview, the introduction also addresses the problematic Eurocentrism endemic in evolutionary aesthetic conceptions of cultural progress and lays out why the book does not engage directly with questions of race. Finally, the introduction explains the methodology of the project and summarizes its trajectory.

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

Chapter 7 explores the final years of Grouchy’s intellectual life, under Napoleon’s Empire. It shows how, growing increasingly distrustful of the ability of the state to foster the faculties of sympathy and reason, Grouchy grew interested in the power of the written word, rather than state-sponsored education, to imbue morality in the population. She turned first to the possibility that the model of an enlightened philosophe, martyred for justice, could inspire proper political sentiments. This provided a rationale for her publication, together with Cabanis, of the first Oeuvres de Condorcet in 1804. She then, together with Fauriel, and inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Schiller, began to explore the importance of poetry, and particularly the idyllic image of humankind in harmony with nature, to replace the state as educator of human emotions. At the same time, she used the moving of her salon to her countryside Maisonnette, and the shifting mode of sociability that this entailed, to model the idea of a civil sphere, protected from the state, where moral and political sentiments could be fostered. Despite this new interest in poetry and civil society, her aims, the Chapter concludes, ultimately remained political.

Walter Pater also anticipates Oscar Wilde’s liturgical moves. Pater depicts Marius the Epicurean as a liturgical subject – that is, Marius relishes the forms of liturgy and yet those forms do not become rigid structures but rather gateways into mystery. Wilde pushes this liturgical subjectivity still further. For him, the porosity of the liturgical subject leads to a full-blown liturgical constructivism: If the self remains open before the mystery of ever further aesthetic experience, then perhaps all things – not just the human self – are malleable. In his critical writings, Wilde denounces the mechanistically closed world of the realist novel, which he sees as slavishly imitating nature. By contrast, Wilde argues that art can reshape nature. Liturgical language and ritual action especially reveal how words remake reality: The priest’s Words of Institution and the drama of the Mass transform – even transubstantiate – the bread and wine. As it did for Wordsworth, liturgy helps Wilde imagine nature not as self-enclosed but rather as participating in a higher, transcendent reality.

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

The 1860s is a decade that, in many ways, marks the death of the Victorian era and the start of a long modernism. Certainly for British poetry, the 1860s marks a moment of historical retrospection, summation, and definition, and, simultaneously, the start of a new poetry of Why is this spelled out?modernity. The year 1861 marked Prince Albert’s death but also a landmark publication that is often overlooked because of ital its popular status: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which was to remain a definitive articulation of the lyric tradition in English poetry for at least a century. Yet the same decade also saw the publication (in 1866) of a volume of poetry that was crucial in opening the door to a new kind of poetry in English: Swinburne’s ital 1866 Poems and Ballads (First Series). This chapter explores the nature and importance of Palgrave’s historical anthology in counterpoint with the birth of a striking new aestheticist poetry.

This chapter addresses Nietzsche’s early exposure to pessimistic thought from the late 1860s to early 1870s, and aims to elucidate his philosophical articulation of pessimism as an individual and cultural problem to be solved. It argues against the view that Nietzsche was, at this time, a straightforward Schopenhauerian and pessimist. The chapter pays special attention to the ‘problem of quietism’, interpreting The Birth of Tragedy as concerned to speak to this problem, distinguishing Nietzsche’s strategy from competing strategies offered by the likes of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Bahnsen, as well as pessimism’s opponents. After interpreting the notion of an artistic ‘justification’ as a solely pragmatic one for Nietzsche, the chapter ends with a discussion of the Untimely Meditations and Nietzsche’s evident early concern for the problem of suffering’s meaning.

This chapter addresses why and how, if it is true that pessimism is a psychological condition as opposed to a philosophical belief, Nietzsche takes there to be a requirement to combat pessimism in ways other than the rational-dialectical manner prevalent among philosophers hitherto. The chapter first offers a conceptual analysis of the closely related but distinct notion(s) of ‘nihilism’, before then arguing how the notorious idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ is, contrary to some contemporary interpretations, specifically deployed by Nietzsche as a response to pessimism. The chapter ends by elucidating Nietzsche’s reversion to the view of The Birth of Tragedy that aesthetic experience is solely capable of facilitating life affirmation, and how aesthetic value is not only distinct but also in tension with moral value.

A distinctive feature of Pater’s oeuvre is that, like many French critics of his generation, he wrote both literary and art criticism; in this respect his work parallels that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter. The chapter argues that, if Jerome McGann is right to describe Pater’s essay on Rossetti as ‘the best single study of Rossetti’s poetry we have’, that is because Pater provides the most persuasive interpretation of this double aspect of Rossetti’s work. The essay is densely intertextual with other writings of Pater’s in ways that can be surprising: verbal cross-references link Rossetti not only to his own chosen precursors (Dante as well as Blake and Michelangelo) but also to Gautier and Baudelaire, and, more importantly, to Plato. Thus it plays a more significant role in Pater’s overall critical project than previous scholars have recognised, not least explaining to us a historical fact that may seem difficult to understand: the extraordinary influence of Rossetti on both painters and poets of his own and succeeding generations, an influence out of all proportion, some may think, to his actual achievement in either art form.

This chapter reconsiders the significance of The Beautiful and Damned (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his place in American modernist literature. This second novel occupies a minor position in the Fitzgerald canon and is often regarded as a move away from his experimentations with romanticism, aestheticism, and decadence to naturalism. By contrast, this chapter argues that the novel remains committed to fin-de-siècle theories of aesthetic hedonism propounded by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in formal, thematic, and intellectual terms and brings them into productive tension with naturalism. The Beautiful and Damned is informed by Paterean theories of perception and hedonism in its preoccupation with the brevity of life, the fragility of beauty, and the necessity of cultivating a heightened mode of perception and consciousness. Naturalism, meanwhile, is deployed strategically as in the narrative to expose the naïve and illusory nature of the aesthetic hedonism of its protagonists. This chapter further argues that Fitzgerald’s reliance on fin-de-siècle tropes should not be understood as anomalous or derivative but, rather, that it situates The Beautiful and Damned in a broader “new decadent” literary movement within American modernism.

The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.

Chapter 4 considers the late nineteenth-century aesthetic press as an embodiment of the collaborative process. Drawing from manuscript culture and William Morris’s lectures, this chapter illuminates two integral processes: individuals coming together to form a liberal community and the mechanization of the Kelmscott Press as a joining of art and writing. By positioning the Press within a larger trajectory of Victorian liberal sentiment, this chapter foregrounds that fraternal communitarian conceptions of liberalism can be understood as the same as Morris’s practical socialism. During the 1880s, liberalism and socialism were closely related. Further, by emphasizing Morris’s belief that the production of art brings relief from the vulgarization of society, this chapter asserts that such reform occurs in the communal endeavor of the press as a business partnership, witnessed in the collaborative productions of Edward Burne-Jones and Robert Catterson-Smith, and William Morris and Charles Gere. Morris’s ideal book, thus, serves as an exemplar of lived sociality in the embodiment of the Kelmscott Press: a site that combines work with social pleasure.

CH 3: The New Woman, a figure that emerged in the fin-de-siècle novel, was a decidedly metropolitan phenomenon. Yet novels by sisters Mary and Jane Findlater and their better-known contemporary Mona Caird explored the possibility of a Scottish New Woman, recognizing the peculiar impediments to economic and intellectual independence faced by women in rural Scotland. Employing aesthetic techniques that foregrounded their own artistry, including impressionistic reveries, abrupt shifts in perspective, and elaborate symbolism, Caird and the Findlaters suggested that the capacity to appreciate and create beauty is the defining characteristic of Scotland’s New Woman. Caird represents the Scottish landscape as a source of inspiration for her musical protagonist but condemns the conformity demanded by Scottish society as antithetical to the development of her considerable genius. By contrast, the Findlaters suggest that women’s artistic development is possible within the limitations imposed by Scottish society, albeit on the small scale that they employ in their own novels.

Some critics polarize Joyce and Yeats by invoking the Irish Literary Revival. This practice, which can seem unduly based on sectarian divisions, the politics of post-1916 Ireland, and the retrospective formulation of ‘Modernism’, fails to address adequately Yeats’s and Joyce’s common origins in the Aesthetic and Symbolist ethos of the 1890s, their common dedication to ‘the religion of art’. Yeats’s profound influence on Joyce attaches Joyce to the Revival, as does the struggle between different brands of cultural nationalism as represented by Joyce in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Walter Pater was fundamentally important to the aesthetics of both Yeats and Joyce; the Paterian ‘epiphany’ as a symbolic structure bridges their poetry and prose; and Charles Stewart Parnell, who can assume qualities of Pater’s ‘artist-hero’, complements Pater in his importance to both: to their dialectics between art and history. The chapter ends with a discussion of some startling thematic overlaps c. 1914 between Yeats’s Responsibilities and Joyce’s Portrait.