From the Divine to the Decadent—A History of Brutish Aesthetic Teleology, 1800–1900

In this essay I offer an alternative vision by which we can understand the course of nineteenth-century British writing and thinking regarding aesthetics and art. Drawing on a range of theological, scientific, philosophical, medical, critical and literary resources, I explore how a broad constituency of writers and practitioners came to develop a distinctive form of Anglophone aesthetic teleology. Following the emergence of this tradition within natural theological aesthetic theories, my argument traces how the same basic conceptual architecture used to grasp aesthetic purposiveness would undergo manifold transformations, unveiling how the logic of the Divine artist became the logic of Decadence.