This chapter considers Michael Field within the context of nineteenth-century decadence. Drawing on Michael Field’s diaries and poetry, it contextualises their continuing interest in key figures of French decadence, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Paul Verlaine, alongside the broader vogue for decadence in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. While Michael Field claimed to deride decadence, an attention to the influence of French decadence in their works illustrates the extent to which they were poetic innovators, responsive to contemporary fashions, and a part of a longer tradition of writers and artists, such as Arthur Symons, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley, who drew on the fruitful possibilities of decadent concepts in their works.

Michael Field are remembered for their poetic works, but they also wrote short prose. Focusing on their collection of prose sketches or ‘croquis’ entitled For That Moment Only, this chapter sets their prose writings in the wider context of the fin-de-siècle trends towards the short story and aesthetic essay. Through analysis of stories like ‘A Maenad’, the chapter outlines Michael Field’s affinities with New Woman prose writers like George Egerton, as well as their affinities with decadent aesthetes like Oscar Wilde. Ultimately, this chapter shows that attending to Michael Field’s prose works as well as their poetry provides a more accurate picture of their distinct contribution to turn-of-the-century literary culture.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems, Sight and Song, in the context of fin-de-siècle art criticism. It explains ekphrasis as a genre and that genre’s relationship with art criticism, as well as Michael Field’s relationship with both. Sight and Song claims to set down on paper the ‘poetry’ that is ‘incarnate[d]’ within their paintings of study. Michael Field try to use the volume to assert their authority as both poets and art critics, instructing their readers about their paintings of study and about how one ought to appreciate all paintings. This chapter explores how successful this project was and how it was informed by Michael Field’s own personal experiences within the predominantly masculine aesthetic and art critical communities.

This chapter examines Michael Field’s queer aestheticism by focusing on their complicated relationship to Walter Pater. It explores how Bradley and Cooper, as women writers and same-sex lovers, adapted Pater’s notably queer aesthetic philosophy to craft their own distinctively modern poetics. They shared Pater’s vision of aesthetic modernity, characterised by an emphasis on personal sensation, sexual dissidence, and intellectual rebellion. However, they also critiqued his masculinist biases and his shift towards respectability later in life. Through their poetic works, diary, and intimate correspondence, they creatively revised Pater’s ideas, positioning themselves as both heirs and innovators within the queer aesthetic tradition and building upon his insights to realise a broader and more inclusive artistic legacy.

Bradley and Cooper wanted their works to be published in formats that were concretely expressive of their contents. From 1890 onwards, virtually none of their books was left untouched by the designer’s hand, and Bradley and Cooper sought out some of the most innovative designers and printers of their day (their long working relationship with Charles Ricketts especially stands out) to produce appropriate print forms for their works. Yet even before the 1890s, Bradley and Cooper strove to match elements of book design to their poetics: from the very start, they had conceptualised their books as embodied objets d’art, and their aestheticism inspired every aspect of their books.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

This chapter traces the origins of Auerbach’s habit of beginning his chapters with a quotation by linking his account of Flaubert’s aestheticism with Pater’s The Renaissance, and it argues that – in contrast to E. R. Curtius – Auerbach’s understanding of aestheticism is democratic.

The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

“Philosophers of the Cabal” inaugurates a line of inquiry devoted to the Volk (people). A powerful critic of Kantian anthropology, Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the “spirit of a people [Volksgeist]” is grounded in a common structure of sensibility or Sinnlichkeit. This shared sensibility derives in part from the notion of the sensus communis theorized by British empiricists in the early eighteenth century. After tracing the influence of British aesthetics on Herder, the chapter moves forward to consider E. B. Tylor, a towering figure of Victorian anthropology known for the evolutionary theories that displaced Herder’s diversitarian model. I show that Tylor actually retained key Herderian premises regarding collective sensation, which modernists like W. B. Yeats then incorporated into a primitivist style. Hence the communalist aesthetics running from Shaftesbury through Herder and Tylor leads ultimately to modernists who came of age during the fin-de-siècle.

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.