UC Irvine

This dissertation reconsiders the social forces and intellectual discourses to which British Aestheticism was responding at the end of the nineteenth century. Often framed by literary critics as a mere bequest from the Parnassian and Symbolist movements in France, Aestheticism’s valorization of the artwork’s formalism, autonomy, and inexorability actually stems, I argue, from its proponents’ acquaintance with the criteria for organic life devised by biologists at the time: morphological holism, homeostatic self-maintenance, and teleological development. Observing the increasing imbrication of life science and social science in this post-Darwinian moment, the Aestheticists applied these criteria with transdisciplinary abandon, wielding them to judge and debate not just styles of artistic composition, but also theories of moral psychology, paradigms of political economy, and the vicissitudes of history. “More Like Life” therefore brings the British Aestheticists into conversation with the bio-sociological theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Max Nordau: where the latter all invoked the metaphor of the ‘social organism’ in order to theorize the endurance and coherence of the relations that comprise society, writers like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Edward Carpenter honed in on the forms and patterns embodied in the organism’s structure and growth in order to scrutinize the aesthetic appeals and investments undergirding Victorian liberalism, capitalism, and democracy. In their interrogation of the aesthetics implicit in the political ideals and biological theories debated in their time, the Aestheticists offer a slew of neglected concepts and historical threads to illuminate the concerns of our own age, including the vulnerabilities of modern democratic institutions and mass movements, our inextricable involvements as citizens in unjust social systems, our lapsing faith in Whiggish notions of ‘human progress,’ and the biopolitical administration of contemporary life.