Aesthetic afterlives : irony, literary modernity and the ends of beauty / Andrew Eastham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eastham, Andrew.

Series:

Continuum literary studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Aestheticism (Literature).

Irony in literature.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

ix, 257 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Continuum, [2011]

Summary:

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 reading of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and 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 Alan Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within postmodern culture. Refering to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno. Book jacket.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780826443984

0826443982

OCLC:

657602688