Art, Agency and the Continued Assault on Authorship

This book presents a counter-history to the relentless critique of the humanist subject and authorial agency that has taken place over the past fifty years.

It is both an interrogation of that critique and the tracing of an alternative narrative from Romanticism to the twenty-first century which celebrates the agency of the artist as a powerful contribution to the wellbeing of the community. It does so through arguments based on philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory interspersed with ...