Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and
Literature Studies - Literature, language: English, abstract: The aim of
this research paper is to trace the origin and development of Art for
art's sake movement from Marxist perspective. The origin of Art for
art's movement can be traced back to the late Romanticists who felt
themselves misfit in the post-revolutionary bourgeois world of business,
profit and industrialisation of the Patriarchal countryside of Europe.
Therefore, an insoluble contradiction occurred between the aims of the
late Romanticist artists and writers and the conditions of the
Post-revolutionary bourgeois capitalist world. However, they became
hostile to it, but failed to see any hope of changing it. The employment
of Marxist literary hermeneutics in analysing Art for art's sake
movement yields the result that the apostles of this movement express
their disharmony with the bourgeois capitalist social formation. They
refuse to be commodity producer in the bourgeois publishing industry, in
which an author is a labourer or commodity producer for those consumers
whom he does not see. However, the apostles of this movement failed to
introduce new modes of literary production as well as to change the
bourgeois social formation. The present research study highlights the
purpose, rise and fall of Art for art's sake movement in an innovative
Marxist perspective.
