Aesthetic Afterlives: Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty (Continuum Literary Studies)

"Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism's cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno."--Bloomsbury Publishing. This an original theoretical reading of the emergence of British literary modernity, beginning with Victorian Aestheticism and tracing its afterlives into the 21st Century. Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870's, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and Modernism. "Aesthetic Afterlives" constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by reading this dialectical condition back from the end of the twentieth century to the Victorian fin de siecle and to the emergence of Modernism. Referring to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and to Ranciere's work on the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno Walter Pater's acoustic space: 'the school of Giorgione', Dionysian Anders-streben, and the politics of soundscape Aesthetic vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the concept of irony 'Master of irony': Henry James, transatlantic bildung and the critique of aestheticism Irony's turn: the redress of aestheticism in Katherine Mansfield's notebooks and stories Sacrificing aestheticism: irony and the dialectics of modernity in D.H. Lawrence's The rainbow and Women in love Aristocracies of mourning: re-consecrating aestheticism in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead revisited Sublime ironies: Samuel Becket and the remainders of romanticism Inoperative ironies: Jamesian aestheticism and post-modern culture in Alan Hollinghurst's The line of beauty The aesthetic afterlives of Mr W.P.: reanimating Pater in twenty first century fiction. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this title investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and Modernism.