| With the coming of modern democratic mechanized civilization, fundamental changes in social structure, principally the rise to an unsteady dominance of the urban middle class, a reaction occurred among certain artists and thinkers that was to lead to the formulation of modern aesthetic and cultural thought. Their "diagnosis" of modern spiritual health led to a desire to redeem the sterile present with the cultural vitality of the past. The central expression of this desire was a protagonist I have chosen to call the "aesthetic hero," and he principally appears in what I have called "critical fiction." Originating in Romanticism, the aesthetic hero reached his definitive development in the fin-de-siecle. The aesthetic hero sought to repair the fragmentation of contemporary culture by effecting a cultural Renaissance in and through his own life. He achieved this by assiduously cultivating his own critical sensibilities toward style in language, painting and decorative arts, hence the development of "critical fiction." The literature of the aesthetic hero was intended to elevate the cultural and spiritual life of the time, and also served as a "spiritual autobiography" for the authors who created it. In the twentieth century, hope in such a process died out, and the few remaining themes continued from the literature of the aesthetic hero are carried by a substantially different type of protagonist. |
