The Radical Aesthetic

by Armstrong, Isobel

• ISBN13: 9780631220534
• ISBN10: 0631220534
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-10-19
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This ground-breaking new work offers a spirited and severe critique of the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing and asserts that it has now become an intellectual necessity to rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse.

Author Biography

Isobel Armstrong is professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, nineteenth-century poetry, poetics, politics, theories of language and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Her most recent books include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) and the Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (1996), edited with Joe Bristow.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
Introduction: A Case for Rethinking the Category of the Aesthetic	1	(24)
Part I The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the `Problem' of the Aesthetic	25	(58)
The Aesthetic and the Polis: Marxist Deconstruction	27	(18)
Writing from the Broken Middle: Post-Structuralist Deconstruction	45	(38)
Part II The Poetics of Emotion	83	(66)
Textual Harassment: The Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?	85	(23)
Thinking Affect	108	(41)
Part III Cultural Capital, Value and a Democratic Aesthetic	149	(46)
Beyond the Pricing Principle	151	(23)
And Beauty? A Dialogue	174	(21)
Part IV Feminism and Aesthetic Practice	195	(63)
Debating Feminisms	197	(42)
Women's Space: Echo, Caesura, Echo	239	(19)
Bibliography	258	(12)
Index	270