Shadows of Events

A new approach to the politics of aestheticismFraming its inquiry both historically and theoretically, Shadows of Events offers the first full account of the unusual but strikingly original ways that the British aesthetic movement responded to contemporary politics. Although the aesthetes were rarely noted for their concern with politics—indeed, a disdain for sordid worldly things was essential to their artistic identity—Matthew Potolsky demonstrates just how important depictions of protests, urban mobs, riots, revolutions, and nationalist uprisings were to their work. Examining poems, plays, critical prose, novels, and short stories by well-known writers such as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Michael Field, and tracing their influence on later writers such as Sarojini Naidu and W.B. Yeats, Shadows of Events encompasses a momentous historical span stretching from the 1848 Revolutions to the dawn of the twentieth century. Potolsky argues that these writers developed a set of innovative techniques to understand and process political events. Treating politics as a work of art, he shows, offered them new means for coming to terms with the turbulence of their times.