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Quinn, Edward. "aestheticism." Writer's Reference Center. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 17 Apr. 2025. <http://fofweb.infobase.com/wrc/Detail.aspx?iPin=DLLT0021>.
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aestheticism

Definition 
In French and English literature, a 19th-century movement that maintained art need serve no moral or ethical purpose. In the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1838), the French poet and novelist Théophile Gautier proclaimed the only purpose of art was to be beautiful. The French symbolist poets attempted to translate that principle into practice.

In England the major texts of the aesthetic movement were Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which concludes with the famous invitation to "burn with a hard gem-like flame" in the "desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake." The best-known advocate of aestheticism was Oscar Wilde, who at the end of his life lamented in De Profundis (1905), "I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction." Formalism represents a modified, less extreme form of aestheticism.

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