aestheticism is a catchword used to designate an attitude toward art that developed during the nineteenth century. Its central tenet is that art occupies its own autonomous realm independent of other spheres of life.Although these other spheres may be represented by various names, they reduce in most cases to the spheres of traditional religion, ideology, morality, and politics — all sources of meaning that tend to determine the form and content of art. These spheres have influenced the style and content of literature as long as there has been literature and continue to do so to the present day. However, in the nineteenth century, historical conditions arose that were favorable to the development of a novel conception of art, one that sought to stake out a territory in which art would be entirely self-determining or autonomous and therefore free from the usual determination by any other sphere. Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790) laid the theoretical foundation for this development, while others, above all the French poet Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), worked not only to diffuse Kant's notions but also to reshape and simplify them. Proponents of this emerging viewpoint saw in it the possibility for a new kind of artistic freedom.

Given the autonomy structure inherent in aestheticism, two types are conceivable. The first type, for which Bell-Villada has coined the apt term “aesthetic separatism,” is characterized by a reciprocal separation between spheres (2). If an autonomous art conceives of the separation between spheres as reciprocal, that is to say, if it understands itself as being just as unable to encroach upon the domain of, say, morals as morals are to determine the content of art, its possibilities will be circumscribed by those boundaries, and consequently rather limited. In this case, the freedom from determination by other spheres won through autonomy exacts a rather high price: the separation of art from life. This kind of aestheticism, which accepts the restrictions imposed on art by other life-spheres can be called a “weak” aestheticism, its most representative group being probably the French Parnassians. However, another aestheticist attitude can be conceived, according to which art, while maintaining the autonomy of its own sphere, oversteps the boundaries of the other spheres, trespasses on their terrain, and proceeds to determine their content. Here art is less well behaved, less self-effacing, less observant of the boundaries between itself and the other domains.