Communism Responds by Politicising Art'?: The Uses of Beauty in Socialist Literature of the Fin de Siecle

My DPhil project explores the relationship between beauty and socialism in British writing of the fin de siecle. Most pressingly, I am interested in a specific conception of beauty that I argue is characteristic of socialist writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: an understanding of beauty as that which has a privileged relationship to desire, and therefore that has the potential to creatively reconstruct one's sensuous relationship to the world.

I trace this understanding of beauty-and of its political value-in texts by William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Vernon Lee, and Nancy Cunard, attempting to construct and highlight a specifically socialist genealogy of political-aesthetic thought at the fin de siecle that is often overlooked by dominant definitions of Marxism, aestheticism, Decadence, and modernism, and thus largely overlooked by current scholarship. This framework is partly corrective, repositioning understudied authors-many of whom are queer and/or women-as prominent thinkers in major late Victorian aesthetic debates, but also offers a new critical framework whereby we read twentieth-century texts through the prism of nineteenth-century political-aesthetic debates.

Throughout, my research is led by key foundational questions: why-at same historical moment that saw the rise of trade unionism, Chartism, Fabianism, and the publication of Karl Marx's ur-text of scientific socialism, Das Kapital (1867)-did socialist, literary writers turned towards a very different philosophical tradition, treating beauty and aesthetic experience as sites of great political promise? Why did socialist, literary writers at the fin de siècle view beauty as an aesthetic phenomenon that realises, and has the capacity to remake, desires, and why did they consider such an effect on subjectivity politically useful?

How and why did socialist writers combine their aesthetic projects, and what aesthetic expressions, styles, and forms emerged as a result of such political-aesthetic experimentation?

I situate my project within a current critical interest in the connections between aesthetics and politics. Both Linda Dowling (The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy [1996]) and Alex Murray (Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past [2023]) trace the political ideologies that inform late Victorian aestheticism, focusing on liberal and conservative influence respectively.

Ruth Livesey's Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism, 1880-1914 (2007) is presently the only work exclusively dedicated to the relationship between socialism and aesthetics at the fin de siècle; however, where Livesey's focus is the tensions between the individualist principles of aestheticism and a socialist commitment to collectivity, my project explores the perhaps surprising moments where the principles and values of both aestheticism and socialism coincide. Although current scholarship largely overlooks the construction of a socialist politics based and founded in aesthetic practice, many cultural institutions are beginning to reassess the relationship between art and left-wing politics during this period; recent exhibitions-for instance, Victorian Radicals (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2024)-demonstrate a wider critical interest in exploring the various politicisations of art at the fin de siècle that is not currently reflected in scholarship.

I hope to position my project in relation to this growing public interest in modes of reading the relationship between politics and aesthetics at the fin de siecle, offering a timely contribution to the field of fin-de-siecle studies.