Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Explores the failure of Romantic critiques of political economy, and the diminishing importance of aesthetic consciousness across the nineteenth century.

Richard Adelman (Author)

9781108439381, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 November 2020

248 pages
22.5 x 15 x 1.2 cm, 0.37 kg

'… Adelman's book is judiciously argued and measured in its tone throughout. It is a subtle, important contribution to the growing field of literary criticism that deals with political economy, achieving precisely what it sets out to do: that is, paint a 'portrait of nineteenth-century culture preoccupied with, and troubled by, the categories of idleness, repose and aesthetic contemplation'.' Christopher Webb, Moveable Type

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-siècle 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.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Idleness, moral consciousness and sociability
2. Political economy and the logic of idleness
3. The 'gospel of work'
4. Cultural theory and aesthetic failure
5. The Gothicization of idleness
Epilogue: substitutive satisfaction
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]