Aesthetic Afterlives: Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty

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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.

Reviews

Aesthetic Afterlives traces the lineage of Paterian aesthetics from its incandescent impact within English fin de sicle culture to its spectral afterimage in modernist and postmodernist writing [] Ambitious in scope, broadly researched and elaborately (if densely) argued, Easthams book will prove of immense use to scholars anxious to reanimate an alternative line of influence in the history of literary modernity. * Naomi Milthorpe, University of Tasmania, Australia *
Aesthetic Afterlives makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Aestheticisms cultural legacy, with its powerful and eloquent account of Aestheticisms afterlives not only in literary modernism, but also in postmodernism and contemporary culture. * Hugh Stevens, University College, London, UK *
What is so striking about Aesthetic Afterlives is the way in which, having established some of the theoretical coordinates that formed the matrix of Aestheticism, it does justice to the rich complexity of affective and aesthetic interactions, including mourning, scorn, irony, yearning, faith and delusion, that mutate through the broad range of texts Eastham considers. * Alex Pestell, University of Sussex, UK *

Author Bio

Andrew Eastham is a Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.