Art for Earth's Sake: Green Aestheticism and the Celtic Revival in Late-Victorian Periodicals

My thesis reframes decadent art's role in the Celtic revival, charting unexplored relationships between cultural revivalism, alternative spiritualities, and proto-environmentalism in fin-de-siècle radical periodicals. I show how Celtic decadents critiqued urbanization and industrialization to challenge human exceptionalist relationships to the Earth and nonhuman life. I argue that these writers and artists used occultism, neopaganism, and folklore to promote dissidence against environmentally harmful infrastructures, mobilizing revivalism that intertwined ancestral respect and ecological protection with the conservation of cultural heritage. My archival work recuperates long-dormant voices, recovering the history of how countercultural aesthetic movements revolutionized Celtic environmental discourses, ideologies, and practices.