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This book offers fresh perspectives on Aestheticism and Modernism. Acknowledging both movements' passion for the 'new', it goes beyond the alleged divide between Modernism and its predecessors. Essays interrogate connections, continuities, and intersections, revealing the working processes of cultural and aesthetic change so as to reassess the value of the new for each. Visiting well-known and neglected figures, they revise assumptions through approaches that borrow from aesthetics, philosophy, or economics. The book proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of Aestheticism and Modernism, revitalizing definitions and revealing new directions in aestheticist and modernist studies.
About the author
Bénédicte Coste is Professor of English at the University of Burgundy, France. She has published on Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, Arnold, Pater, Symonds, Wilde and Symons. She is the author of Walter Pater, esthétique (2011); Walter Pater, critique littéraire (2010) and has co-edited Aesthetic Lives (2013).
Catherine Delyfer is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse, France. Her publications focus on fin-de-siècle culture and late-Victorian female writers. She is the author of Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: the Fiction of Lucas Malet (2011) and the co-editor of Aesthetic Lives (2013).
Christine Reynier is Professor of English at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier, France. She has published extensively on modernist writers, edited books and journals on Woolf, published a monograph, Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story (2009), and has recently co-edited, Reframing the Modern Short Story, Journal of the Short Story in English 64 (Spring 2015).
