A英美文学期末复习.docVIP

Critical Realism（批判现实主义）The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying characterization of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils. The representative novelists are Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte sisters and William Makepeace Thackeray and so on. Aestheticism Aestheticism, the doctrine or disposition that regards beauty as an end in itself, and attempts to preserve the arts from subordination to moral, didactic, or political purposes. The term is often used synonymously with the Aesthetic Movement, a literary and artistic tendency of the late 19th century which may be understood as a further phase of Romanticism in reaction against philistine bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality. Aestheticism found theoretical support in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant and other German philosophers who separated the sense of beauty from practical interests. Elaborated by Théophile Gautier in 1835 as a principle of artistic independence, aestheticism was adopted in France by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Symbolists, and in England by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and several poets of the 1890s, under the slogan lart pour lart (‘art for arts sake’). Wilde and other devotees of pure beauty—like the artists Whistler and Beardsley—were sometimes known as aesthetes. Aestheticism Late 19th-century European arts movement that centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone. It began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to the perceived ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. Its philosophical foundations were laid by Immanuel Kant, who proposed that aesthetic standards could be separated from morality, utility, or pleasure. James McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Stéphane Mallarmé raised t