EL40FB: THE AESTHETIC MOMENT: ART AND VALUE IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN (2026-2027)

Much given to meditating on the social function of art, Mattew Arnold felt the aim of criticism was ‘to see the object in itself as it really is’. Begging to differ, Oscar Wilde wrote that the aim of criticism should be ‘to see the object in itself as it really is not’. Something had changed in the understanding of art in the later nineteenth century, and possibly in reality itself; and as the certainties of the church, state and empire unravelled, writers increasingly confronted what I propose to call ‘the aesthetic moment’. This, broadly speaking, was the daring possibility – to be confronted, accepted, or violently opposed – that the point of art was art itself, art for art’s sake, and without any lingering responsibility to the sense of moral purpose that had so tormented Arnold (‘All art is perfectly useless’ – Wilde again). The aesthetic moment took many forms, from the art criticism of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, to the encounter with Italy we find in the poetry and prose of E. B. Browning and George Eliot, the critique of utilitarianism of Dickens’ Hard Times, and the rich and subversive comedy of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. This course offers an ambitious survey of this bridging moment between Victorianism and modernism, and the audacious and beautiful works of art it produced.

While the primary focus of the course will be literary, reference will be made throughout to other art forms, including painting, music and architecture.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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There are no assessments for this course.