Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life is a history of literary aestheticism from the eighteenth century to modern deconstruction. Gene H. Bell-Villada examines writings by critics, philosophers, and other writers from Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Uniting all is his conviction that “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.”

Gene A. Bell-Villada is a professor and chair in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Williams College. He is the author of Borges and His Fiction, Garcia Márquez: The Man and His Work, and The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror.

"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

1997 National Book Critics Circle Awards, sponsored by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), finalist