Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900

Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.

'This is a lucidly written and very valuable study in an area of research that is growing ever more germane to our present lives; Adelman's attentiveness to the social and political promise which resides within the vita contemplativa is particularly moving and welcome.' Adelais Mills, British Society for Literature and Science Reviews (bsls.ac.uk), '… Adelman's book is judiciously argued and measured in its tone throughout. It is a subtle, important contribution to the growing field of literary criticism that deals with political economy, achieving precisely what it sets out to do: that is, paint a 'portrait of nineteenth-century culture preoccupied with, and troubled by, the categories of idleness, repose and aesthetic contemplation'.' Christopher Webb, Moveable Type

Richard Adelman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. His previously published work includes Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830 (Cambridge, 2011), Political Economy, Literature and the Formation of Knowledge (2018; edited with Catherine Packham), as well as numerous essays on figures including Dante Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, John Keats and J. M. Coetzee.