Book: Art for Art's Sake Movement

Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life:
How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism, 1790–1990

By Gene H. Bell-Villada

''Lucid and learned. . . . much more than an exercise in retrieval, although it is splendid on this account alone, Bell-Villada has also joined debates about the Latin American novel, deconstructionism, and post-modernism, offering what is always in short supply: a wide-angled, historical, and penetrating perspective''.

—Russell Jacoby.

''Professor Bell-Villada has rendered an incomparable service to those probing the sources of the modern aesthetic . . . I have found his book so wide-ranging and inclusive that I would recommend it enthusiastically"

—Dore Ashton.

“A wide-ranging, erudite, well-written study with a refreshing disdain for doctrine.”—Publishers Weekly.

“There are concrete social, economic, political, and cultural reasons for the emergence, growth, diffusion, and triumph of l’art pour l’art over the past two centuries.” Bell-Villada

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