Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics by Hugh GradyShakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare’s plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. Hugh Grady draws on a tradition of aesthetic theorists who understand art as always formed in a specific historical moment but as also distanced from its context through its form and Utopian projections.
At a time when postmodernism seems to have achieved a dominant position in cultural and critical theory the contributors to this volume provide a much needed corrective to the misleading images of modernism which have dominated recent debate. Richard Sheppard's account of European modernism focuses on the profound ideological crisis which beset Western culture between 1890 and 1930 and examines the ways in which artists and intellectuals responded to it; Bernard McGuirk analyses the ambivalent reactions of Apollinaire and Alberti to the machine age; David Wragg investigates the aesthetic and epistemological underpinnings of verbal and visual Vorticism in the work of Wyndham Lewis and Mike Johnson considers the potential for a (post)modernist political aesthetic in the Merz texts of Kurt Schwitters.
Politics and Aesthetics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. As a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction, but overt political statement conflicted with her aesthetic ideals. Her solution was to combine innovative narrative techniques and subject matter traditionally associated with women.
This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.
Oxford University Press, USA | 2007-07-02 | ISBN: 0192806173 | 480 pages | PDF
In the Critique of Judgement, Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of
representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the degree in which nature has a purpose, with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment.
The work profoundly influenced the artists, writers, and philosophers of the classical and romantic period, including Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In addition, it has remained a landmark work in fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical
aesthetics, and contemporary critical theory. Today it remains an essential work of philosophy, and required reading for all with an interest in aesthetics.
