Fictions of Autonomy

Modernism from Wilde to de Man

Bibliographic Data

ID5833794
AuthorsAndrew Goldstone, Andrew B Goldstone (0000-0002-2875-1290, corresponding author)
Year2013
Pages204
Publication date2013-02-04
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueFictions of autonomy (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199861125.001.0001
OpenAlexW4240196731
ISBN9780199861125
Open LibraryOL25316804M
LanguageEN
Citations received11

The idea of aesthetic autonomy-of art as a law unto itself-was a central preoccupation of modernism. Yet recent literary scholarship has tended to reject autonomy out of hand as a denial of literature's social and historical contexts. This book argues instead that autonomy is modernism's distinctive mode of social relations; it demonstrates the many forms of relative autonomy modernist novelists, poets, critics, and theorists imagined and strove for. Using a combination of formalist reading, Bourdieuean sociology of culture, and historical contextualization, the book uncovers the centrality of autonomy problems and aspirations in unexpected modernist topoi: the relations between domestic servants and aesthetes; visions of literary and musical late style; the Parisian expatriate lifestyle; and the figure of tautology. Through these topoi, this book analyzes four successively more expansive versions of autonomy for the artwork: from the world of labor, from the artist's personality, from political community, and from referentiality. The book's analysis shows that autonomy is indispensable to a historical understanding of transnational modernism from late-nineteenth-century aesthetes (Wilde, Huysmans, Henry James), to high modernists (Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens), to late modernists (Djuna Barnes, Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man). Goldstone concludes that autonomy remains equally vital as a key concept for a renewed, sociologically rigorous literary study-of modernism and of other literary epochs-and an important but contentious doctrine in contemporary literature

Aesthetics · Art · Autonomy · Political science · Sociology · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Law · Literature and Culture Studies · Social and Cultural Dynamics · 20th century · Aestheticism (Literature) · Autonomy (Philosophy) · History and criticism · Literature, Modern · Literature, modern, history and criticism · Modern Literature · Modernism (Literature) · Theory

Tools

Open DOILibgen