Literary Terms – Aesthetics, Aestheticism, and Aesthetic distance

Literary Terms,Aesthetics,Aestheticism,Aesthetic distance

Literary Terms – Aesthetics, Aestheticism, and Aesthetic distance

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Aesthetics:

The philosophy of art; the study of the nature of beauty in literature and the arts, and the development of criteria for judging beauty

See also:

AESTHETICISM,

LITERARY CRITICISM,

NEW CRITICISM.

 

Aestheticism:

Reverence for beauty; for "art for art's sake.” The term also refers to a nineteenth-century movement in art and literature that held that beautiful form is more to be valued than morally instructive content, and even that morality is irrelevant to art. An early expression of aestheticism is found in John Keats's lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In part a reaction against the ugliness and mere usefulness of the products of industrialization, the movement reached its peak in The 1890s and is usually associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley, who aspired to live their very lives as art, to live lives of beauty and intensity and brilliance rather than lives of goodness or usefulness. The tendency of the followers of aestheticism to focus on a sensational subject matter and surface polish led Alfred, Lord Tennyson to satirize the ideals of the movement:

The filthiest of all paintings painted well Is mightier than the purest painted ill!

See Also:  

AESTHETICS,

DECADENCE.

 

Aesthetic distance:

Standing apart from a work of art as a reader or viewer; recognizing that it is an art and not real life.

See Also:

DISTANCE.