Literary Aesthetics: A Reader / Edition 1

by Alan Singer

Overview

It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that as it has moved toward greater interdisciplinarity it has grown skeptical of the aesthetic. This anthology reasserts the continuing relevance of the aesthetic and aims to reintegrate it into the widening repertoire of contemporary literary critical practices.

From its inception literary aesthetics has been engaged in the full range of debates generated by the criticism of culture. Unlike the more restricted discourse of philosophical aesthetics, it has explored the ways in which value commitments extend across disciplinary domains by reckoning with the practical concerns of art production and consumption.

The readings in this anthology reach back to classical sources of philosophical aesthetics and forward to the most current accounts of the utility or value of the literary artwork in postmodern culture. The organization of the text is designed to engage the reader in the shaping debates of literary aesthetic theory and demonstrate their continuing relevance for our understanding of the ways literature sustains and critiques culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900631208692
Publication date:	01/02/2001
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alan Singer teaches in the Department of English at Temple University, specialising in critical literary theory and film theory. His books include The Subject as Action (1993).

Allen Dunn is at the English Department at the University of Tennessee.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	viii
	Introduction	1
I	Community, Culture, Politics	13
	Lord Shaftesbury	15
	Francis Hutcheson	21
	Karl Marx	27
	Georg Lukacs	33
	Walter Benjamin	42
	Herbert Marcuse	49
	Theodor W. Adorno	55
	Hans-Georg Gadamer	61
	Louis Althusser	67
	Fredric Jameson	72
II	Beauty and Sublimity	79
	Longinus	81
	Plotinus	87
	David Hume	94
	Edmund Burke	98
	Immanuel Kant	103
	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	109
	Walter Pater	116
	Martin Heidegger	122
	Maurice Merleau-Ponty	128
	Jean-Francois Lyotard	134
III	Truth, Value, Ethics	141
	Plato	143
	Giambattista Vico	148
	Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten	154
	Johann Georg Hamann	163
	Johann Gottfried Herder	168
	Friedrich Nietzsche	176
	Matthew Arnold	181
	Jacques Lacan	187
	Rene Girard	192
	Jacques Derrida	197
IV	Literary Formalism	203
	Aristotle	205
	Monroe C. Beardsley	211
	Benedetto Croce	217
	Victor Shklovsky	223
	T. S. Eliot	230
	Cleanth Brooks	235
	Roland Barthes	241
	Gerard Genette	246
V	Agency, Expression	253
	Friedrich Schiller	255
	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel	259
	Friedrich Schlegel	265
	Ralph Waldo Emerson	270
	John Dewey	276
	Ludwig Wittgenstein	282
	Kenneth Burke	288
	Charles Altieri	293
VI	Gender	299
	Aphra Behn	301
	George Eliot	305
	Virginia Woolf	311
	Julia Kristeva	315
VII	Aesthetic/Anti-Aesthetic: Contemporary Debates	319
	Paul de Man	321
	Arthur C. Danto	326
	Tony Bennett	332
	Pierre Bourdieu	338
	Jean-Luc Nancy	346
	Index	355

Editorial Reviews

"This volume can be strongly recommended as a first reader in aesthetics for interested students of literature." Reference Reviews

From the Publisher