Book contents
- Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Idleness, Moral Consciousness and Sociability
- Chapter 2 Political Economy and the Logic of Idleness
- Chapter 3 The ‘Gospel of Work’
- Chapter 4 Cultural Theory and Aesthetic Failure
- Chapter 5 The Gothicization of Idleness
- Conclusion
- Epilogue Substitutive Satisfaction
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Epilogue - Substitutive Satisfaction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2018
- Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Idleness, Moral Consciousness and Sociability
- Chapter 2 Political Economy and the Logic of Idleness
- Chapter 3 The ‘Gospel of Work’
- Chapter 4 Cultural Theory and Aesthetic Failure
- Chapter 5 The Gothicization of Idleness
- Conclusion
- Epilogue Substitutive Satisfaction
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
I want to end this study by briefly considering Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of aesthetic consciousness and contemplative power, specifically as those are expressed in his 1930 work Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which was published in English in the same year as Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud may lie in a very different tradition of thought from the trans-cultural preoccupation with idleness and aesthetic consciousness this study has reconstructed. But the nineteenth-century British debates over these categories in fact anticipate and foreshadow the psychoanalytic interpretation of aesthetic thought that Freud develops – and that is thrust upon British intellectual life – early in the twentieth century.
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- Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 , pp. 192 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018