Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts

This volume brings together new essays from distinguished scholars in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, history, literary studies, art history - to explore various ways in which aesthetics, politics and the arts interact with one another. Politics is an elastic concept, covering an oceanic breadth of mechanisms for conducting relations between empowered groups, and these essays offer a range of perspectives, including nations, classes, and gendered subjects, which examine the imbrication of politics with arts. Together they demonstrate the need to counteract the reductionist view of the relationship between politics and the arts which prevails in different ways in both philosophy and critical theory, and suggest that the irreducibility of the aesthetic must prompt us to reconceive the political as it relates to human cultural activity.

• Covers a wide range of topics involving politics and the arts • Newly commissioned essays from contributors in several disciplines • Accessibly written, suitable for upper-level undergraduates and up

1. Contesting the arts: politics and aesthetics Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell; 2. From the stage to the state: politics, form and performance in the Elizabethan theater Louis Montrose; 3. Republican beauty, sublime democracy: civic humanism in Gadamer and Rawls J. M. Bernstein; 4. Travellers, colonizers, and the aesthetics of self-conception: Denis Diderot on the perils of detachment Anthony Pagden; 5. The aesthetics of nationalism and the limits of culture David Carroll; 6. Peripheral visions: class, cultural aspiration, and the artisan community in mid-nineteenth-century France Neil McWilliam; 7. The war of tradition: Virginia Woolf and the temper of criticism Daniel Cottom; 8. The discomfort of strangeness and beauty: art, politics, and aesthetics Peter de Bolla; 9. The political autonomy of contemporary art: the case of the 1993 Whitney Biennial Michael Kelly.