Swinburne reads Keats: Prostitution, pornography and the decadence of aesthetic critique
Clicks: 346
ID: 100539
2015
Keats and Swinburne loom large as purveyors of the “aesthetic” in its early and late nineteenth-century forms—that is, as a discourse of subject-formation through the exercise of tasteful distinction and as a self-referential discourse of art for art’s sake, respectively. In this essay, I analyse how Swinburne constructs a “Keats” that will allow him to master a “manliness in crisis” that affected both writers. If this “crisis” is historicized by the body as a social matter that Victorian legislators were policing in the forms of prostitution and pornography, it is, I argue, this materiality that Keats and Swinburne insist of enjoying rather than sublimating. The ultimate question I pose is this: can aesthetics become the critical discourse that recent revisionary readings have postulated if both a Romantic and a Decadent aesthetic insist on enjoying the body, materiality, gender instability and other topoi communicated by prostitution, pornography and poetry.
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gonsalves2015swinburnecogent
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| Authors | Gonsalves, Joshua David; |
| Journal | cogent arts & humanities |
| Year | 2015 |
| DOI | DOI not found |
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| Keywords |
Nursing
Medicine
Literature (General)
general works
psychology
public aspects of medicine
history of scholarship and learning. the humanities
social sciences
arctic medicine. tropical medicine
criminal law and procedure
communication. mass media
recreation. leisure
fine arts
arts in general
religions. mythology. rationalism
modern history, 1453-
medieval history
journalism. the periodical press, etc.
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