Rethinking Aestheticism - HOA00124M

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  • Department: History of Art
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: M
  • Academic year of delivery: 2025-26

Module summary

This module explores the emergence of Aestheticism in British art and art writing in the later nineteenth century, as well as its critical legacies.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 2 2025-26

Module aims

In the later part of the nineteenth century, there emerged in Britain a loose affiliation of artists, writers, and audiences gathered around the rubric of ‘Aestheticism’. ‘They had the courage of their affectations’, Roger Fry would later write; ‘they openly admitted to being “intense”’. Ever since, these practices, and the notions of art they came to stand for, have been by turns feverishly embraced and scornfully dismissed, with their celebration of beauty and their ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. This module interrogates such claims, developing new approaches to this notorious episode of nineteenth-century artistic culture as it emerged out of the concerns of later Pre-Raphaelite artmaking. It considers Aestheticism as, in the first place, a discourse of the body (to adapt Terry Eagleton’s phrase), in which an aesthetics of excess, sensation, and insistent corporeal feeling came to model new ways for artworks to operate upon the world. Further topics will include the movement’s relation to scientific discourse, especially the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory; its cultivation of new forms of subcultural belonging; its interactions with the volatility of art markets and its innovations in exhibition practice; its relations to and understandings of artistic cultures outside of Britain; its engagement with new technologies of vision; its afterlives in more recent art and thought. Special attention will fall on the unique interactions of text and image that lent the movement its special character, giving shape to Aestheticism’s most powerful visions of modern life.

Key artists may include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, Albert Moore, Frederic Leighton, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Evelyn de Morgan, Aubrey Beardsley, James McNeil Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Phoebe Anna Tarquair, and others.

Key writers may include Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Sidney Colvin, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Charles Darwin, Grant Allen, Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Vernon Lee, and others.

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

  • Detailed knowledge of the art and art writing associated with Aestheticism in Britain;
  • Familiarity with a wide range of interpretive approaches to the study of this field;
  • A developed sense of the historical and critical stakes of interdisciplinary approaches to artistic culture.

Indicative assessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Module feedback

You will receive feedback on assessed work within the timeframes set out by the University - please check the Guide to Assessment, Standards, Marking and Feedback for more information.

The purpose of feedback is to help you to improve your future work. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further, you are warmly encouraged to meet your Supervisor during their Office Hours.

Indicative reading

  • Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2019.
  • Arscott, Caroline. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings. London: Yale University Press, 2008.
  • Colvin, Sidney. ‘English Painters and Painting in 1867’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 2 (October 1867): 473-76.
  • Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 volumes. London: John Murray, 1871.
  • Edwards, Jason. Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.
  • Field, Michael [Katherine Bradley and Emma Cooper]. Sight and Song. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892.
  • Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting. London: Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan & Co., 1873.
  • Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. 3 volumes. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851-53.
  • Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Ward Lock & Co., 1891.