Title
Idleness and aesthetic consciousness, 1815-1900 / Richard Adelman.
ISBN
9781108539791 (ebook)
9781108424134 (hardback)
9781108439381 (paperback)
Publication
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Physical Description
1 online resource (viii, 233 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 25 Jul 2018).
Access and use
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Summary
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Variant and related titles
Cambridge University Press eBook Backlist 2018-2019.
Other formats
Print version:
Added to Catalog
June 05, 2020
Series
Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 112
Contents
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Idleness, moral consciousness & sociability
Political economy & the logic of idleness
The 'gospel of work'
Cultural theory & aesthetic failure
The gothicization of idleness
Conclusion
Epilogue substitutive satisfaction
Notes
Bibliography.