Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism

This book offers fresh perspectives on Aestheticism and Modernism. Acknowledging both movements’ passion for the ‘new’, it goes beyond the alleged divide between Modernism and its predecessors. Essays interrogate connections, continuities, and intersections, revealing the working processes of cultural and aesthetic change so as to reassess the value of the new for each. Visiting well-known and neglected figures, they revise assumptions through approaches that borrow from aesthetics, philosophy, or economics. The book proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of Aestheticism and Modernism, revitalizing definitions and revealing new directions in aestheticist and modernist studies.