Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture

A revealing enquiry into how Victorian evolutionists and aesthetes converged over utopian ideas about beauty, pleasure, and social progress.

Lindsay Wilhelm (Author)

9781009469357, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 December 2024

272 pages
23.6 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.542 kg

The Aesthetic Movement, a collection of artists, writers and thinkers who rejected traditional ideas of beauty as guided and judged by morals and utility and rallied under the banner of 'art for art's sake', are often associated with hedonism and purposelessness. However, as Lindsay Wilhelm shows, aestheticism may have been more closely related to nineteenth-century ideas of progress and scientific advancement than we think. This book illuminates an important intellectual alliance between aestheticism and evolutionism in late-nineteenth-century Britain, putting aesthetic writers such as Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater into dialogue with scientific thinkers such as Darwin and mathematician W. K. Clifford. Considering in particular how Aestheticism and scientific thinking converged on utopian ideas about beauty, Lindsay Wilhelm reveals how this evolutionary aestheticism crucially shaped Victorian debates about individual pleasure and social progress that continue to resonate today.

1. On the origin of evolutionary aesthetics
2. Evolution, secular reverence, and the rise of aestheticism
3. The Utopian (r)evolutionism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde
4. Art for the sake of life: 'life-enhancing' aesthetics in the Fin de Siècle
5. Taste and cultural progress in Bloomsbury and beyond
Coda: the critic as prophet.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]