Introduction -- An institutional approach -- Aesthetic autonomy in practice and philosophy -- The fictions of autonomy and their themes -- Modernist studies and the expanded field -- Autonomy from labor: in service to art for art's sake from Wilde to Prouse -- Aesthetic autonomy? Our servants will do that for us -- Wilde: the truth of masks with manners -- Huysmans: the decadent master-servant dialectic -- Henry James: the subtlety of service -- Proust: service in the magic circle -- Aestheticist self-consciousness -- Autonomy from the person: impersonality and lateness in Eliot and Adorno -- Adorno's theory of impersonality -- Eliot's late style, 1910-58 -- Four Quarters and musical lateness -- The late style and the intentional fallacy -- Expatriation as autonomy: Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and aesthetic cosmopolitanism -- Nightwood: the luminous deterioration of cosmopolitanism -- French nights and the artist's lifestyle -- Wandering Jews, wandering Americans -- "Vagaries Malicieux": losing all connection at the Deux Magots -- Stephen Dedalus's hat -- Literature without external reference: tautology in Wallace Stevens and Paul de Man -- The aesthete is the aesthete -- The academy of fine ideas: Stevens and de Man in the University -- De Man, modernism, and the correspondence theory -- The sound of autonomy -- The plain sense of tautology -- Epilogue: autonomy now -- Autonomy, literary study, and knowledge production -- Autonomy abroad: proliferation on the world stage -- The truth about fictions of autonomy.