Aestheticism and Decadence in the Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
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Burkhard Niederhoff
Abstract
Aestheticism and, to a lesser extent, decadence are very prominent in the early writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. In his autobiographical essay “Ordered South” (1874), Stevenson echoes the “Conclusion” of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) when he recounts his quest for moments of aesthetic experience; he also presents himself as an invalid who has become detached from life and is ready for the grave. In “An Autumn Effect” (1875), an essay about a walking tour in Buckinghamshire, he anticipates Oscar Wilde’s paradox that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and describes his experiences in terms of paintings and literary motifs. Stevenson’s later writings are characterised by a shift from art to ethics, but he never quite abandoned his early aestheticism, as is shown by his critique of realism in a number of essays written in the 1880 s.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Late-Victorian Decadence as Mode, Theory and Attitude
- Vernon Lee’s Decadent Vision of History: Waste and Possibility
- Absinthe as a Cypher for Decadence and Catalyst of Degeneration in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris
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- The Closed Buds of Decadence: Reproductive Idleness in the Poetry of Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Late-Victorian Decadence as Mode, Theory and Attitude
- Vernon Lee’s Decadent Vision of History: Waste and Possibility
- Absinthe as a Cypher for Decadence and Catalyst of Degeneration in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris
- Aestheticism and Decadence in the Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Closed Buds of Decadence: Reproductive Idleness in the Poetry of Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson
- “All Things to All Men”: Decadence as Represented in Lionel Johnson’s Early Literary Journalism
- Dramatic Adaptations and Worldview Translations: The Implied Metaphysics of Roger Howard’s Margery Kempe. A Ballad Play (1978) and Heidi Schreck’s Creature (2009)
- The Neoliberal Impasse: Economy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
- Eating the Archive: Food Recipes, Migrant Women, and Decolonizing Multiculturalism in Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook
- I’m going home, Riv? Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home... African American Homeplaces and Resistance in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Reviews
- Sarkowsky, Katja, and Mark U. Stein (eds.). 2021. Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi, 262 pp., 14 figures, 5 tables, € 117.70.
- Jens Martin Gurr. 2024. Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do. New York, NY: Routledge, x + 209 pp., £ 145.00/$ 190.00.
- Pamela Buck. 2024. Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs. Early Modern Feminisms. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 202 pp., 13 colour and 13 b-w images, $ 150.00.
- Naomi Levine. 2024. The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 255 pp., 3 halftones, $27.50.
- Emily Horton. 2024. 21st-Century British Gothic: The Monstrous, Spectral, and Uncanny in Contemporary Fiction. London/New York/Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 272 pp., £ 85.00.
- Miles P. Grier. 2023. Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery. Writing the Early Americas. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, xv + 325 pp., 15 illustrations, $ 100.00.
- Allan Hepburn (ed.). 2024. Friendship and the Novel. Montreal/Kingston et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 297 pp., $ 110 CAD/€ 143.95.
- Debamitra Kar. 2025. Conflict Zone Literatures: A Genre in the Making. London: Routledge, 196 pp., £ 145.00.
- Pramod K. Nayar. 2024. Vulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, x + 295 pp., £ 90.00.
- Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, and Conrad Scott (eds). 2025. Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities. London: Routledge, 232 pp., £ 145.00/ $ 190.00.
