Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1960. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 460-475).

It is the individual and not art that is at the heart of Walter Pater’s philosophical aesthetics. Even as Pater realizes the ‘illusive inscrutable mistakable’ nature of the individual under the conditions of modernity, his aesthetics revolve around it. He boldly attempts to reconsider the kind of individualism that will be possible in the wake of modernity, searching within the chaos and ephemera of a Godless universe to seek Man’s raison d’etre within the imagination. Certainly, his idiosyncratic thought is not a system, nor even a consistent vision, so much as a faltering meditation on what kind of individualism is possible under the conditions of modernity. It is a discourse situated at a schism in humankind’s consciousness of itself: on one hand, looking to the philosophies Pater studied carefully -- those of Hume, Kant, Schiller and Goethe, amongst others -- and on the other hand, understanding that the emerging future will require its own conception of reality. With these issues in mind, my study has two main aims. First, it explores the troubled vicissitudes of Pater’s conception of the individual. Second, it argues that Pater has a significant position, not only in the history of literary style, but in the history of ideas, by tracing how his thought interacts with and reconceives the philosophical traditions of British empiricism, German Romanticism and Idealism. Its chapters are organized around six central concerns: the relationship between self and world, the nebulous conceptions of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul,’ sensuality, the body as subject and object, passing time and the eternal moment, and ethics. These issues are considered with reference to the full range of Pater’s essays and imaginary portraits, including his unpublished manuscripts, ‘The History of Philosophy and ‘The Aesthetic Life.’ Their significance is understood within the context of Pater’s intellectual milieu, his own life and their resonances through literary modernism.

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This thesis concerns a shift in the historiography of the Venetian painter Giorgione (c1477- 1510). In important ways, this change was caused by Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) in their A History of Painting in North Italy (1871). This text met seminal reactions from Walter Pater (1839-1894) in his essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and from Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) in his Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (1880). Following a method of close reading, the analysis will concentrate on the intertextual relationship between these three works. This thesis contends that Crowe and Cavalcaselle comprehensively problematised scholarship on the artist, creating a “new” Giorgione; that Pater responded dialectally to scientific connoisseurship with aesthetic criticism, intellectually justifying and morally absolving his interpretation; that Morelli responded by offering a noticeably different catalogue of paintings, and by making Giorgione function within his anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a validation for his method; however, in so doing, Morelli was conducting an ironic problematisation of connoisseurship in general. The thesis begins with an introduction to the “old” Giorgione, before discussing the concepts of aestheticism and connoisseurship. It is then divided into three studies and a conclusion. The first part considers how the artist was understood in the nineteenth century prior to Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s research, before discussing the nature of the two connoisseurs’ enquiry. The second part focuses on Pater and his relationship with Giorgione, placing his essay in the context of The Renaissance (1873); after this the study follows Pater as he defines his theory of aesthetic criticism and responds to what he understands as scientific history, before analysing his interpretation of Giorgione. The third and final part of this thesis will seek to understand Morelli’s ambiguous text and the function of the artist within it; examining his method, rhetoric, and polemic with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, it will conclude by arguing that irony was an active concept in Morelli’s thinking. By attending to a specific artist’s historiography at a particular time, this thesis indirectly reveals the way art history on Italian painting operated in this period, when the discipline was undergoing the processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation.

This dissertation examines Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s knowledge and interpretation of the Italian Renaissance during the 1860s. I argue that there is a relationship between Rossetti’s Aestheticism and his understanding of the Italian Renaissance and that this relationship is visibly manifested in his images of women from the period. In Victorian England, Aestheticism and the philosophy of beauty for its own sake became increasingly popular throughout the 1860s. I challenge the idea that Aestheticism and an interest in Renaissance art are mutually exclusive aspects of the artist’s work. Rossetti’s images of women expressed both his understanding of Renaissance art and the central place of beauty in painting. Based upon Rossetti’s interpretation of Renaissance art and poetry, his criticism, and the criticism of his peers, this dissertation argues that the beauty of women in Rossetti’s paintings came to stand for the beauty of art. Rossetti’s paintings promoted sensual Aesthetic experience in their conflation of formal and female beauty. Using the historically idealized conventions of female portraiture, Rossetti created images of women that privileged Aesthetic beauty over narrative or moral meaning. His use of vibrant, rich color, a quality he and his peers inexorably associated with Venetian Renaissance painting, revealed the connection between Renaissance art and his Aestheticism. Color helped to define his paintings of women as examples of beautiful, sensuous painting. For Rossetti, the representation of alluring, beautiful women was the most powerful way to express the experience of Aesthetic beauty as intoxicating, sensual, and even morally ambiguous.

This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

This study problematizes the criticism Oscar Wilde received for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and aims to explore the aesthetic style he employed when writing the novel. The theoretical approach used in this essay is based on the perspectives of New Historicism; Wilde’s life and how people reasoned during his lifetime are brought into focus and different influences on his work are examined, especially evidence of biographical aspects as well as aesthetic elements in the novel. Wilde himself refuted that he had written an immoral story, insisting that morality was not part of Aestheticism. He also made an effort to clarify his aesthetic objectives in later editions by removing some ambiguous sentences and adding a preface.

The main object of my dissertation, focused on aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, includes: transparent recapitulation of thoughts presented in Wilde's theoretically principal texts and further interpretation of Wilde's aesthetics in its complexity and up-to-dateness as well. The key importance for the Wilde's aesthetics, for the main texts capturing his aesthetical thinking, is partly superiority of art over reality, partly the program "life as art". Let's encapsulate individual texts from this perspective: In The Decay of Lying the art - a beautiful lie serves as a paradigm for life and nature. In the essay The Critic as Artist the criticism-art is an example of how people should live: either to escape to beauty, to imagination or to escape to a dissociated, aestheticized view of life. This aesthetically-ethical choice is one of the substantial aspects in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: art as an example of how to manage to live a hedonic and sensual live as much as possible - in contrast to a certain extent - how to live a "dissociated, spectatorial life". In The Soul of Man Under Socialism the art has its revolutionary-political dimension: it represents a model of a real individualism; maximum self- development. Finally, in De Profundis Wilde includes in his "artistic life", which is a matter of...

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

The aim of the submitted thesis is a comparison of symbolism of a double in Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte and Romány tří mágů of Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic. We will focus maily on death as a key motif of literature at the fin de siècle and a motif that is, in works we are examining, closely linked with the existence of a double. We will inspect motif of a double in the context of psychological states of mind. The choice of compared texts was motivated by the process of self disintegration. The process of self disintegration is closely connected with the process of depersonalisation which appears when a subject makes contact with a soulful space or a object. Cities (Bruges, Venice, Prague) which are the scene of this self disintegration take a special place in the literature of symbolism as a urban space of art and death at once. Despite mutual relation of life and art, the strange tension, and the phenomenon of annihilation, is still present within this relation.