Art and life in aestheticism : de-humanizing and re-humanizing art, the artist, and the artistic receptor

Art for art's sake addresses the relationship between art and life. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization and to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large. Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction: Reflections on the Relationship between Art and Life in Aestheticism....Pages 1-21 Front Matter....Pages 23-23 The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity....Pages 25-41 Rossetti’s Aesthetically Saturated Readings: Art’s De-Humanizing Power....Pages 42-61 Dickens À La Carte: Aesthetic Victualism and the Invigoration of the Artist in Huysmans’s Against Nature....Pages 62-75 Front Matter....Pages 77-77 Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Concept of Irony....Pages 79-95 The De-Humanization of the Artistic Receptor: The George Circle’s Rejection of Paterian Aestheticism....Pages 96-108 Art for the Body’s Sake: Nietzsche’s Physical Aestheticism....Pages 109-121 Front Matter....Pages 123-123 From “God of the Creation” to “Hangman God”: Joyce’s Reassessment of Aestheticism....Pages 125-138 The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics....Pages 139-158 On the Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem—and Me....Pages 159-170 Front Matter....Pages 171-171 Beauty be Damned: On Why Adorno Valorizes Carrion, Stench, and Putrefaction....Pages 173-188 “This temptation to be undone ...” Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style....Pages 189-207 Art for Heart’s Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser....Pages 208-231 Back Matter....Pages 232-240 Art and Life in Aestheticism examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the human realms over the past two hundred years of aestheticism's genealogy in Europe and the Americas. The chronological and transnational scope permits a consideration of the potential social import of literary and artistic creations that purportedly exist for their own sake. Drawing on and expanding the concept of de-humanization put forth by Još Ortega y Gasset, contributors determine whether or not the de-humanization of art leads to re-humanization, that is, to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large or between the artist or the artistic receptor and his or her human existence. Although not all contributors locate a corresponding process of re-humanization to match, counter, or accompany aestheticism's de-humanizing impulse, they share in the volume's mission of rethinking the underpinnings of the aestheticism movement and its complex treatment of art and life "Examines the relationship between the aesthetic and the human realms over the past two hundred years of aestheticsm's genealogy in Europe and the Americas"--Page 4 of cover