Life as the End of Life: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics
Abstract
This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary
aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late
Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger,
epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and a cult of beauty
are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of
God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the
model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by
historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at
stake in Swinburne and Pater’s efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I
suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an
independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation
understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres.
Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space
created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical
terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their
varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of
modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly,
prior to a ‘fall’ into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify
this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by
their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic.
My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of
aestheticism grows out of Swinburne’s and Pater’s efforts to challenge and
refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous
generation of Victorian writers – Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas
Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson – and situates this
shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of
secularisation.
Authors
Lyons, SarahCollections
- Theses [4203]