Introduction : On the Politics of Aesthetic Detachment

This introduction to the special issue of Genre titled “Aestheticism Now!” explores the status of the aesthetic and of aestheticism within contemporary literary studies and introduces the individual articles. The place of aesthetic detachment within the context of literary studies remains contested. If the final decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a widespread skepticism toward the notion of the aesthetic—a skepticism as apparent in the frontal assaults on the idea of aesthetic autonomy as it is in the broad adoption of politicized contextualization as the dominant critical method—subsequent years have also seen a plethora of efforts to reassert the centrality of autonomous aesthetic experience. Whereas these new cases for and analyses of the aesthetic have invigorated the discipline over the past two decades, aestheticism remains moored in its late Victorian context. As a consequence, a certain tension still exists between the efforts to reassess the significance of the aesthetic and the study of aestheticism as an influential historical phenomenon. The present issue aims to move the conversation forward by placing a reevaluation of aestheticism firmly within the context of broader ongoing debates about the autonomy of aesthetic experience.