The Radical Aesthetic

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.

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.

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

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The Radical Aesthetic

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials