Art for Heart’s Sake: The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser

Abstract

After decades of relative neglect inspired by modernist and Marxist tendencies alike, recent decades have witnessed a resurgence in critical interest with regard to both the aestheticist movement and the phenomenon of the aesthetic as such. As Nicholas Shrimpton has pointed out in “The Old Aestheticism and the New,” critics gradually returned to aesthetes such as Walter Pater in the 1960s, ultimately leading to a widespread re-examination of their core texts in terms of recent critical movements such as deconstruction, new historicism, and gender studies in the 1980s and 90s. This literary-historical research, Shrimpton suggests, helped create the conditions under which the “new aestheticism” of the last decade or so could arise. Rejecting the conception of the aesthetic as a straightforward epistemological or ideological smokescreen, recent publications have attempted to recast the aesthetic in more appreciative “deconstructive,” “Marxist,” and “ethical” terms (Shrimpton 10).