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.
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