Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, the contributors to this volume showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Essays combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. In their introduction, Weinstein and Looby argue that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, the essay casts the current ‘return to aesthetics’ as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics.
Subsequent essays demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—contributors revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, these essays explore literature’s aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood.
Contributors include Edward Cahill, Ivy G. Wilson, June Ellison, Dorri Beam, Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Looby, Wendy Steiner, Cindy Weinstein, Trish Loughran, Jonathan Freedman, Elisa New, Dorothy Hale, Mary Esteve, Eric Lott, Sianne Ngai
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby Part 1: Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom Liberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America, by Edward Cahill
The Writing on the Wall: Revolutionary Aesthetics and Interior Spaces
Stephen Crane’s Refrain, by Ivy G. Wilson
Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state, by June Ellison Part 2: Aesthetics and the Representation of Sexuality Aesthetics Beyond the Actual: The Marble Faun and Romantic Sociability, Christopher Castiglia
Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet, by Dorri Beam
Sexuality’s Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and the Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Christopher Looby
From Hawthorne to Hairspray: American Anxieties About Beauty, by Wendy Steiner Part 3: Aesthetics and the Reading of Form When is Now? Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality, by Cindy Weinstein
Reading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading, by Trish Loughran
What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Critical Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge, by Jonathan Freedman with an addendum by Nan Zhang Da
Upon a Peak in Beinecke: The Beauty of the Book in the Poetry of Susan Howe, by Elisa New Part 4: Aesthetics and the Question of Theory Warped Conjunctions: Jacques Rancière and African American Twoness, by Nancy Bentley
Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy Hale
Postwar Pastoral: The Art of Happiness in Philip Roth, by Mary Esteve
Perfect Is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio; or, If Hooks Could Kill, by Eric Lott
Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, by Sianne Ngai Afterword
Contributors
Index
About the author
Cindy Weinstein is professor of English at the California Institute of Technology and the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. She is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe and coeditor, with Peter Stoneley, of A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900–1950.Christopher Looby is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States and editor of The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. With Christopher Castiglia, he is the coeditor of a special issue of ESQ on ‘New Approaches to Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature’ and wrote the introduction to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself.
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