Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic

In this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, Cultivating Victorians shows how a mid—Victorian liberal discourse of individual "many—sidedness"—understood as a cultivated disposition toward self—crit...