| Revising British Aestheticism: Critics, Audiences, and the Problem of Aesthetic Education focuses on the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee, between the years 1840 and 1920. The critics of my study believed that the subjective experience of art was the common beginning of an aesthetic education that should end, however, with substantive changes in social relations and ways of living. This dissertation is interested in how aesthetic critics communicated the values, principles, and practices of an aesthetic education through forms of aesthetic criticism---especially, how they positioned themselves respective to their audiences, as teachers in one sense, and as fellow subjects in another. I argue that the paradox of asserting critical authority on the same grounds that activated audiences to educate themselves, that is, the subjective experience of art, created a distinctive problem of address.Chapter One analyzes a range of Lee's works in comparison with Ruskin's to show how they both initially attempted to motivate a general audience to embark on an aesthetic education in common with them, but, as their careers progressed, they constructed model audiences sympathetic to them. Chapter Two argues that the interactive nature of the epistolary form of Fors Clavigera, controversially addressed to the "the workmen and labourers of Great Britain," subjected Ruskin's authority to challenges from his readers. Chapter Three proposes that Lee's and Wilde's adaptations of the Platonic dialogue conveyed their realization that an aesthetic education, although theoretically accessible to all, was ultimately directed at a select audience. Chapter Four explores Morris's attempt to re-orient his aesthetics and utopian vision on communal terms and address the mass in his lectures and articles, rather than rely on the cultivation of a personal perspective.The configurations of audience in nineteenth-century aesthetic criticism make us rethink how we evaluate reception as well as challenge paradigms of configuring the reader, exclusively based on fictional modes. My project's contribution lies in the attention to the ways in which interpersonal relations between critics and readers mediate---negotiate, complicate, and often compromise---the desire for a more ideal society. |
