The first chapter traces the notion of “art for art’s sake” to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who first engaged with questions of aesthetics in the early 1850s. In their attempts to account for the evolution of the sense of beauty – an adaptation with no obvious survival value – both writers exempted a wide swath of aesthetic activities from the natural laws of scarcity and struggle that governed other areas of biological life. This chapter argues that their evolutionary explanations for beauty (the theories of sexual selection and “play," respectively) thus laid the scientific groundwork for later conceptions of aesthetic experience as escapist, salutary, and therefore beneficial for the species. The chapter concludes with an analysis of selected literary works by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith, whose respective corpuses illustrate the diffuse impact of these ideas on literary evocations of the beautiful.

In Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs, three ‘Negresses’ magically appear at the moment that the speaker signs away his legal rights to life. This fantasy is an example of how actual bondage and historical slavery shape the sadomasochistic imagination. This chapter traces that imagination through poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, written at the height of Victorian sexology. It looks at the metaphor of the plough or the ploughman in relation to bondage and Hopkins’s class politics, and at the flagellation fantasies in Swinburne’s poetry (including his juvenile compositions), and the way that those poems fetishise the foot, mouth and ‘bum’. It discusses the theatricality and suspension of agency involved in masochism in relation to specific examples of colonial violence, to challenge the idea that the voluntary submission to constraint in radical sex practices can undermine forms of social domination.

The 1880s inaugurated the movement from analogue to digital communication as the global possibilities of electronic communications became visible for the first time. This chapter considers the effects of what Paul Virilio has called ‘tele-contact’ on two painters, Evelyn de Morgan and Burne-Jones, and a poet, Swinburne. All three reinvent old forms in the context of newly imagined global distance and possibilities of transmission, communication and signal-failure and loss. Evelyn De Morgan’s The Sea Maidens (sometimes called The Sea Sisters) of 1885-6 and Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1887) take up the ancient emblem of the mermaid to consider both the seductive and the dangerous possibilities of global connectivity. Their paintings dramatise the paradox of contactless contact. Swinburne re-makes the medieval French verse form of the rondeau in his A Century of Roundels (1883), a sequence of poems which undermines sequentiality and suggests the degeneration of meaning during transmission. All these works pose sharp questions about the relation of structure to meaning, of surface to depth, and of transmission to communication in the 1880s. These were fundamental questions for aesthetics, but they were also political questions.