Aesthetic Afterlives : Irony, Literary Modernity and the Ends of Beauty.

Cover; Half-title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Acknowledgements; Contents; List of Abbreviations; Introduction; Chapter 1 Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian Anders- streben and the Politics of Soundscape; Chapter 2 Aesthetic Vampirism: The Concept of Irony in the Work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee; Chapter 3 'Master of Irony': Henry James, Transatlantic Bildung and the Critique of Aestheticism; Chapter 4 Irony's Turn: The Redress of Aestheticism in Katherine Mansfield's Notebooks and Stories.

Chapter 5 Sacrificing Aestheticism: The Dialectic of Modernity and the Ends of Beauty in D.H. Lawrence'sChapter 6 Aristocracies of Mourning: The Reconsecration of Aestheticism in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; Chapter 7 Sublime Ironies: The Remainders of Romanticism in Samuel Beckett's; Chapter 8 Inoperative Ironies:Jamesian Aestheticism and Postmodern Culture in Alan Hollinghurst's; Chapter 9 The Aesthetic Afterlives of Mr W.P.: Reanimating Pater in Twenty- first-Century Fiction; Notes; Works Cited; Index.

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Lite.

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-250) and index.

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