Kelly Comfort 
Art and Life in Aestheticism 
De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist and the Artistic Receptor

Art for art’s sake addresses the relationship between art and life. Although it has long been argued that aestheticism aims to de-humanize art, this volume seeks to consider the counterclaim that such de-humanization can also lead to re-humanization and to a deepened relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world at large.

Table of Content

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Reflections on the Relationship between the Art and Life in Aestheticism; K.Comfort REEVALUATING THE SEMINAL WORKS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AESTHETICISM The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity; M.Murphy Rossetti’s Aesthetically Saturated Readings: Art’s Dehumanizing Power; I.Martin Dickens À La Carte: Aesthetic Victualism and the Invigoration of the Artist in Huysmans’ Against Nature; P.Fox RECONSIDERING TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY AESTHETICISM Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Irony of the Modern Object; A.Eastham The Dehumanization of the Artistic Receptor: The George Circle’s Rejection of Paterian Aestheticism; Y.Ivory Art for the Body’s Sake: Nietzsche’s Physical Aestheticism; K.Ashbaugh REREADING THE AESTHETICIST STRAND OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE From ‘God of the Creation’ to ‘Hangman God’: Joyce’s Re-Assessment of Aestheticism; D.M.Shea The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics, Autonomous Aesthetics, and the Idea of Politics; R.Archambeau On the Cold War, American Aestheticism, the Nabokov Problem–and Me; G.H.Bell-Villeda REASSESSING AESTHETICISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY THEORY Beauty By Damned: Or Why Adorno Valorizes Carrion, Stench, and Putrefaction; C.B.Sumner ‘This temptation to be undone…’: Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style; S.Garland Art for Heart’s Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser; B.De Bruyn Notes Index

About the author

ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU is Associate Professor at Lake Forest College, USA KAEL ASHBAUGH is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, USA GENE H. BELL-VILLADA is Professor of Romance Languages at Williams College, USA BEN DE BRUYN is a research assistant at the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) in connection with the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. ANDREW EASTHAM is a visiting lecturer at King’s College London, UK PAUL FOX is Associate Professor of Literature at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates SARAH GARLAND teaches American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK YVONNE IVORY is Assistant Professor of German at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA ILEANA MARIN is Associate Professor at Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania and is currently attending the Textual Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA MARGUERITTE MURPHY is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Bentley College, USA DANIEL M. SHEA is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College, USA CHARLES SUMNER is completing his dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, USA