The Aesthetics of Redemption in fin de siècle Literature and the Arts

This dissertation explores a cluster of texts in fin de siècle aestheticism from a Nietzschean perspective, questioning whether their claims about art and life are, at bottom, world-affirming or world-denying. I argue that the aesthetic worldviews of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde manifest a struggle against Christian (especially Protestant) values, a struggle that, however, periodically and sometimes fatally capitulates to the otherworldliness it seeks to overcome. Chapter 1 delineates the theoretical framework for my investigation. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche and Max Weber, I begin by examining the diverse strains of otherworldliness, some more implicit than others, that run through the aesthetic theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Charles Baudelaire. In Chapter 2, I consider the evolution of Nietzsche’s own aesthetic philosophy from his youthful embrace of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk to his mature view that the Dionysian artist exemplifies the individual who has vanquished all decadent urges to be redeemed from worldly suffering, and is thus able to affirm life through his work. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Pater’s contemplative aestheticism, which originally sets out to counteract the antipathy to the ‘here and now’ associated with ascetic Protestantism, ends up reproducing the hierarchy between the temporal world and a more desirable ‘otherworld.’ In the fourth and final chapter, I suggest that Wilde overcomes the otherworldliness of Paterian aestheticism but only by advancing a secularized version of aesthetic incarnation. This dissertation argues that aestheticism is neither an inevitable offshoot of secularization nor a particular phase of Christian theology, but rather a struggle to work through the complex moral and philosophical dilemmas that arise from the rigorous commitment to valuing life on its own terms.Ph.D