Aestheticism

Question 1

Stéphane Mallarmé

Answer 1

• supported independent radicalism of the arts

“let man be democratic; the artist must be separate and remain an aristocrat”
- artist is the relic of the hierarchical society who sustains high values

Question 2

Arthur Rimbaud

Answer 2

• modernist who leaps into culture

- author of unprecedented verse challenging convention, embodies the principle of artistic/ sexual/ political radicalism

Question 3

1873: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

Answer 3

Walter Pater
- “in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment or instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat”

• “but when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions”

Question 4

The Decadent Movement in Literature

Answer 4

Arthur Symons

“this literature is certainly typical of a civilisation grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action”

Question 5

De Goncourts - on the aim of Impressionist artists

Answer 5

“desperate endeavour to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life”