It was a striking rebuttal to the norms and moral codes of the Victorian era. Pater wrote what is generally considered the manifesto of the movement, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), in which he promulgated that era for its emphasized on subjectivity, sensory encounters with lovely things, self-indulgence, and putting one’s energies and efforts into the pursuit of the aforementioned. Wilde claimed that life imitated art and not the other way around. Poets demonstrated florid style, packing their verse with metaphor, paradox, allusion, and more. In literature, Wilde and his tutor Walter Pater led the charge, with Theophile Gautier and the poets Charles Baudelaire and Charles Algernon Swinburne also adding their voices to the movement. Their works drew on diverse sources, prized feminine beauty and sensuality, explored color and harmony of tone, and created mood rather than narrative.

In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant paved the philosophical foundation by writing of differentiating aesthetic standards from morality, utility, and pleasure.Īrtists at the zenith of the movement included the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the British artists Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and the American James McNeill Whistler. The origins of the movement stem from the Industrial Age, perceived as crass and corrupting by artists and intellectuals. Art is no longer judged by moral standards but by the standards of beauty alone-i.e., its own criteria. Indeed, morality is absolutely subordinate to the aesthetic, as the aesthetic experience is the only thing with meaning. In that it promotes the idea of beauty as preeminent in the arts, what is elided is an explicit (or even implicit, most of the time) focus on the political, social, and didactic. It is a late 19th-century European movement that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, fashion, and more. We will look at it further to illuminate the writer and, hopefully, elements of the fairy tales.Īestheticism is often defined as, simply, “art for art’s sake” (a phrase coined by French novelist Theophile Gautier in his 1836 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin). Oscar Wilde’s work is often discussed in the context of Aestheticism, a movement that he espoused and participated in.

The happy prince and other stories