Idleness and aesthetic consciousness, 1815-1900 / Richard Adelman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Adelman, Richard, 1982- author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English literature.

Aestheticism (Literature).

Aesthetics in literature.

Laziness in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 233 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siecle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Contents:

Idleness, moral consciousness and sociability

Political economy and the logic of idleness

The 'gospel of work'

Cultural theory and aesthetic failure

The gothicization of idleness

Conclusion

Epilogue: substitutive satisfaction.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781108424134

1108424139

OCLC:

1031415584