This concept in literary theory traces the 19th-century shift in literature and criticism away from metaphysical absolutes toward history, flux, and multiplicity, examining how major thinkers theorized literature's relation to modernity. It surveys a spectrum of responses—Marx's dialectical materialism and alienation critique, Eliot's ethical realism, Baudelaire's aesthetics of the fleeting, Arnold's ideal of cultural coherence, Nietzsche's perspectivism and dissolution of fixed truth, Pater's and Wilde's aestheticism, and Mallarmé's dissolution of authorial presence—together marking literary criticism's transition from a doctrine of unity and being toward multiplicity and becoming, anticipating poststructuralism.
This concept in literary theory traces the 19th-century shift in literature and criticism away from metaphysical absolutes toward history, flux, and multiplicity, examining how major thinkers theoriz…