Focusing particularly on the work of painter and critic Roger Fry, critic Clive Bell, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, and literary theorist I. A. Richards, the final chapter considers the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although these twentieth-century writers rejected the developmental telos that defined nineteenth-century evolutionary aestheticism, this chapter argues that they inherited many of their predecessors’ ideas about the anti-utilitarian ethics of beauty, the spiritual potency of aesthetic pleasure, and, consequently, the long-term social benefits of good taste. By drawing a through line from mid nineteenth-century evolutionary aesthetics to the aesthetics of the Bloomsbury group and the principles of New Criticism, this chapter also contributes to a body of recent scholarship reassessing conventional narratives about modernism and its purportedly radical break from Victorian concerns and values.

The fourth chapter challenges our tendency to conflate fin-de-siècle aestheticism with a pessimistic Decadence by exploring the “life-enhancing” aesthetics of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her younger colleague, the American connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Steeped in Walter Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and Herbert Spencer’s progressive evolutionism, both Lee and Berenson attempted to balance their passion for Renaissance art with their equally strong commitments to scientific rationalism and (especially in Lee’s case) social amelioration. Looking at Lee’s extensive corpus of critical prose, travel writing, and fiction as well as Berenson’s early Renaissance studies, this chapter argues that their intersecting investigations into the nature of beauty culminated in Lee’s influential “psychological aesthetics”: a cross-disciplinary theory that insisted on the evolutionary value of positive aesthetic experience and thus elevated the stakes of public taste.

This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

Focused on twentieth-century art criticism, this chapter shows how critics and essayists such as Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, and Michael Fried addressed the problems of medium and abstraction. The rise in the prominence of the essay on visual art during this period corresponds with the ascendancy of abstract representational painting and sculpture. It is as if the retreat from figuration opened a breach through which language – in the form of the essay – took up the role of advance guard. The essay enacted the experience of visual art rather than merely describing and judging it. In parallel with the proliferation of abstraction, writing on art turned away from representing the art object and toward the production of a self-sufficient experience. Pointing to nothing outside itself, the autonomous abstract work was matched by the essay attempting to become a wholly independent force of intellectual creation. The chapter traces how essayists responded to modernist and abstract art, and elucidates the role this writing played in settings such as art schools, magazines, museums, and other institutions that funded, displayed, and popularized the art of the day.