The Emergence of the Art for Art’s sake Movement. Its Origin from a Marxist perspective

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, language: English, abstract: The aim of this research paper is to trace the origin and development of Art for art’s sake movement from Marxist perspective. The origin of Art for art’s movement can be traced back to the late Romanticists who felt themselves misfit in the post-revolutionary bourgeois world of business, profit and industrialisation of the Patriarchal countryside of Europe. Therefore, an insoluble contradiction occurred between the aims of the late Romanticist artists and writers and the conditions of the Post-revolutionary bourgeois capitalist world. However, they became hostile to it, but failed to see any hope of changing it. The employment of Marxist literary hermeneutics in analysing Art for art’s sake movement yields the result that the apostles of this movement express their disharmony with the bourgeois capitalist social formation. They refuse to be commodity producer in the bourgeois publishing industry, in which an author is a labourer or commodity producer for those consumers whom he does not see. However, the apostles of this movement failed to introduce new modes of literary production as well as to change the bourgeois social formation. The present research study highlights the purpose, rise and fall of Art for art’s sake movement in an innovative Marxist perspective.