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In the 1890s,
the religious questioning, unrest, and sense of decline dominated as
Victorian culture faced the dawn of a new age. Fin de siecle (end of the
century) anxieties caused many Victorians to feel that their nation was in
decline socially, politically, and artistically. This sense of cultural decay was
expressed in art through the Aesthetic or Decadent movement of the 1880s
and ’90s. Aesthetic artists felt
that the traditions and values of the Victorian age had become superficial,
hypocritical, and powerless. Aesthetes
particularly attacked the age’s emphasis on rigid morals and
respectability. (See the PowerPoint
presentation on Oscar Wilde for more information on how the Aesthetic
movement and Oscar Wilde’s writings, such as The Importance of Being
Earnest, satirized high Victorian morals). Aestheticism argued that instead of
creating art to present a moral message to society, the artist can create and
appreciate art merely for its own sake.
Art did not have to be didactic.
These beliefs resulted in a resurgence of sensational literature (and
Gothic literature) in the late Victorian Period, literature intended to shock
and titillate.
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