Ruth Thrush

My DPhil project explores the relationship between beauty and socialism in British writing of the fin de siècle. 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 siècle that is often overlooked by dominant definitions of Marxism, aestheticism, Decadence, and modernism. 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 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?