Naomi Milthorpe: Andrew Eastham, Aesthetic Afterlives

Summary

Aesthetic Afterlives traces the lineage of Paterian aesthetics from its incandescent impact within English fin de siecle culture to its spectral ‘afterimage’ (3) in modernist and postmodernist writing. Eastham outlines the continuing ‘cultural legacy’ (1) of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Persuasively arguing that Pater ‘set a model for literary modernity both in style and philosophy’ (1), he examines Pater's legacy of ‘disenchantment and persistence’ (2) in writing ranging from Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee and Henry James to its ‘shadowy contemporary presences’ (188) in Alan Hollinghurst and Zadie Smith.

While it is a critical commonplace that modernist writing emerged from 1890s Symbolism and Aestheticism, at the same time as it rejected them, there have been few recent studies that track these hereditary traces so thoroughly. Eastham focuses on the modernist and late modernist work of Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Samuel Beckett, but there is no reason why his general arguments, once unpacked, could not fruitfully be applied more widely to other modernist works. At the very least, Eastham's epigrammatic outline of the ways in which literary modernism ‘covertly mediated’ the ‘central tropes’ of Aestheticism can provide future scholars with a useful definition of the two movements’ shared concerns:

the refusal of habitual and conventional concepts of identity; the image of self-wrought, artificial beings; the development of a literary style that carried a new kind of sensuous consciousness, at the same [time] as it opened up a space of acute epistemological crisis. (173)

While High Modernism attempted through a pose of extreme ironic detachment to repudiate the self-regarding ‘excesses of the 1890s’ (96), it was nevertheless ‘implicated’ (173) in Aestheticism's twin legacies of beauty and irony, as Eastham demonstrates in the chapters on Mansfield, Lawrence and Waugh. The young Mansfield, returning to New Zealand from her adolescence in London, yearned for an ‘ideal of a sensuous life to come’ (86), in which the Aestheticism of Wilde and Pater figured centrally.