Persistent Autonomy and Romanticism Author Maarten Doorman Affiliation Universities of

Abstract: Autonomy in the arts is generally considered an outdated concept, an atavism that is only relevant to outsiders and to people who have a mere tradi-tional, if not completely obsolete understanding of the artistic and aesthetic field. Autonomy in this view has little to do with contemporary discussions about art and artistic practices. The contemporary relevance of the concept is illustrated with the existence and the curriculum of the university English department, which ‘has modernist autonomy in its genetic code’, and also with the institution of the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose winners have been defending aesthetic autonomy in their ceremony speeches every time. Those examples suggest that autonomy is more rejected in the academic field than in the practices of, in this case, the world of literature. Autonomy in the arts is generally considered an outdated concept, an atavism that is only relevant to outsiders and to people who have a mere traditional, if not completely obsolete understanding of the artistic and aesthetic field. Autonomy in this view has little to do with contemporary discussions about art and artistic practices. The very first sentence of a recent study about au-tonomy in literary fiction, Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy (2013) for example reads: ‘In literary studies, we regard aesthetic autonomy as an idea whose time has passed.’1 Goldstone starts his book with the observation ‘that the belief that art — including literature — is a law unto itself, neither governed by nor respon-sible to extra-aesthetic concerns, has few defenders among scholars today.’