Summary on Aestheticism: characteristics, exponents and meaning of this literary and artistic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Summary on Aestheticism
In the second half of the nineteenth century two currents were formed: symbolism (poetry of Baudelaire , Verlaine , etc.) and aestheticism .
The fundamental characteristic of Aestheticism is the extreme cult of beauty and art and the fundamental principle is “ art for art’s sake ”, that is, the exaltation of art for its own sake, separated from any social context and conditioning, from any moral conditioning.
Aestheticism exalts art as a superior form of existence and thus develops the equivalence and exchange between art and life.
Even the artist’s biography must conform to high aesthetic models, precisely because there is a profound difference between the artist’s life and the vulgarity of bourgeois existence.
The definition of Aestheticism can be used for different eras and aspects of culture, but we are referring to that aesthetic tendency which developed between the years 1866 and 1890.
Aestheticism means dandyism, eccentric elegance in clothing, in attitudes ( The Picture of Dorian Gray ), snobbery, refined aristocratic individualism, for example: an aesthete is Huysmans , D’Annunzio , Wilde , and to some extent also Baudelaire (in his eccentric clothing).
Aestheticism: Characteristics of the Novel
Aestheticism concerns prose more to tell the truth and the novel . Already throughout the 19th century the novel was the most widespread literary genre : realist , naturalist, veristic novel.
The novel that reflected the everyday world, which was written in a language that imitated the truth, reality.
From the 1980s onwards, the novel also undergoes a transformation: the novel is invested by these aestheticizing tendencies; the point of arrival of a culture that despised bourgeois utilitarianism, despised the established society, vulgarity, the crowd and which, by contrast, had the cult of art and beauty: the myth of life lived as a work of art, model and point of reference.
The model and manifesto of this genre of narrative was Huysmans’ novel Against the Current
The scientific and sociological interests that had characterized the naturalistic novel give way to portraits of strong, extraordinary personalities, of these refined and eccentric personalities.
