The Future of Winckelmann’s Classical Form

Winckelmann’s thought and writing are routinely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on the artistic practices of the half-century after his death, known under the label ‘Neoclassicism’. Standard accounts of modernism in the arts, however, assume that this influence came to an abrupt end around 1815. According to such accounts, the anti-classical reaction that followed the Battle of Waterloo and the demise of Neoclassicism was itself a motive force in the generation of modern art and modernism. This paper argues, on the contrary, that Winckelmann’s ideas not only remained relevant, but gained in power through the generations after the fall of Napoleon. Mediated by critics and artists among whom Walter Pater and Frederic Leighton serve as the principal examples, Winckelmann’s thought made a decisive contribution to twentieth-century modernism. In particular, the articulation in both criticism and artistic practice of ideas about classical form, indebted to Winckelmann, had a subtler and more complex impact on the modernist doctrine of ‘formalism’ than literary or art historians have acknowledged. A renewed attention to classical form will help future scholars to write a more nuanced account of modernism in the visual arts. More importantly, it will call attention to artistic projects that have been excluded from histories of modern art due to reductive assumptions that classicism and modernism are inherently contradictory. The paper concentrates on Frederic Leighton as a case study of an artist whose historical importance and aesthetic merit have been occluded by reductive thinking of this kind.

JAMES JOYCE’s EARLY AESTHETIC THEORY

In this article, the author attempts to shed some light on the development of James Joyce’s aesthetic views in the context of the culture of the end of 19 and the beginning of 20 century. Relevance of this work is attributable to necessity of additional systematization of the aesthetic views of James Joyce. In this article, the author analyzes Joyce’s diaries 1903-1904, essays 1899-1902 and his novels “Stephen Hero” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. The author considers the main concepts of Joyce’s aesthetic such as “analytic method”, “drama”, “classical temper”, “epiphany”. Considerable attention is paid to artistic rethinking of the aesthetic of Thomas Aquinas in James Joyce’s works. Joyce interprets the aesthetic of Thomas Aquinas in the manner of Walter Pater estheticism. In the context of this rethinking, Joyce’s concept of “epiphany” becomes important. Taken from theology concept “epiphany” is interpreted as a special view of the artist. The author concludes that the Thomist theory of the beautiful is reinterpreted in Joyce's work in the vein of English aestheticism of the late 19th century. The results of this investigation can be used in the works dedicated to modernism and in the teaching of literature of this period.

Decadent Rituals

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.

Decadence and Japan

In the second half of the nineteenth century, literary decadence developed in parallel with japonisme, the taste for Japanese art and culture that seized Western countries following Japan’s opening to foreign trade. This article starts with an analysis of how the intertwining of japonisme and art for art’s sake pioneered by visual artists influenced writers associated with decadence, such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. The evolving relationship between decadence and japonisme assumed a distinctive character in the work of Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan all through the 1890s and wrote a series of influential books about the country. The article closes with an account of how ideas of decadence traveled back to Japan. Yōshū Chikanobu’s color prints reverse the orientalist gaze of Western artists by documenting a Japanese fascination with European culture that traditionalists viewed as a symptom of decadence. As Japanese literature opened itself to cosmopolitan influences, key writers such as Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Junichirō, and Mishima Yukio borrowed from Western literatures to provide ambivalent depictions of Japan’s social and cultural changes.

‘Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from?’: Englishness and the Search for an American National Style, 1850–1900

ABSTRACT The identification of the American elite with the Renaissance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as seen in the extended Capitol Building and National Mall in Washington DC, can be traced back to architectural, historiographical and cultural trends taking place in Britain. The writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds framed the debate in the United States. At first Ruskin’s antipathy towards the Renaissance was exacerbated by the Nativist Party’s opposition to Catholic immigration, but then the writings of Pater and, particularly, Symonds achieved what Wallace K. Ferguson described as ‘the thorough naturalization of Renaissancism in the English-speaking world’. Symonds’s Hegelian interpretation of the historical era as a ‘spirit of self-conscious freedom’ enabled Americans from the 1870s onwards to post-rationalise the Renaissance as a national style. Symonds dethroned the Ruskinian cult of the Gothic and celebrated Renaissance classicism and secular individualism. His image of Italian despots as ‘self-made men of commerce’ and an ‘aristocracy of genius and character’ appealed to US capitalists, while his admiration for the sumptuous palaces built by these Renaissance ‘men of power’ reinforced the evolutionary theories of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’ became the creed of American plutocrats as they built their own palatial houses. Finally, his frequent references to the discovery of America by Columbus came to legitimise the image of the US as the heir of Renaissance culture, as proclaimed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Introduction

Drawing on definitions by Walter Pater and Charles Baudelaire, the introduction sees literary cosmopolitanism as a characteristic phenomenon of the turn of the century. It argues that writers looked back to important formulations of world citizenship in Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, while also understanding cosmopolitanism as part of the material conditions of their own modernity. The introduction provides an historical overview of the complex relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from the seminal theories of Johann Gottfried Herder to the end of the nineteenth century. It charts how cosmopolitanism became attached to a distinctive, often gendered social identity connoted by worldliness and privilege, which often masked anxieties about migration and international mobility. It argues that literature played a key role in determining the cultural, linguistic, ethical, and affective possibilities for cosmopolitanism in the fin de siècle, and that our own approach to the literature of this period should become more international and comparative.

‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons

This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Gilberto Freyre e Walter Pater: violência e conservadorismo político atravessados pelo sagrado

Neste trabalho, discutimos a repercussão da pequena narrativa literária The Child in the House (1878), do escritor inglês Walter Pater, na formação do cientista social Gilberto Freyre, no período que se inicia com seus estudos universitários nos Estados Unidos, em 1918, até a publicação de sua obra-mestra Casa-Grande & Senzala, em 1933. A partir da “circularidade das ideias”, conforme propõe Carlo Ginzburg, e a concepção de “apetite pelo sagrado”, do cientista político Gisálio Cerqueira Filho, da Universidade Federal Fluminense, discutimos como a dimensão do sagrado circulou entre as obras de Walter Pater e Gilberto Freyre, e foi apropriada pelo pensador brasileiro, orientando a construção de sua narrativa histórica, bem como sua predileção por temáticas que estão correlacionadas à estética (desejo de beleza) e religião (desejo de redenção). Discutimos como o sagrado invade, circula e atravessa a produção intelectual de Gilberto Freyre, no período supracitado.