Radical Aesthetic

Isobel Armstrong is professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, nineteenth-century poetry, poetics, politics, theories of language and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Her most recent books include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) and the Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (1996), edited with Joe Bristow.

• Introduction: A Case for Rethinking the Category of the Aesthetic. Part I: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the 'Problem' of the Aesthetic:.1. Cultural Materialism and Culturalism.2. The Aesthetic and the Polis: Marxist Deconstruction.3. Writing from the Broken Middle - Post Structuralist Deconstruction.Part II: The Poetics of Emotion:.4. Textual Harassment: the ideology of close reading, or how close is close?.5. Thinking Affect.Part III: Cultural Capital, Value and a Democratic Aesthetics:.6. Beyond the Pricing Principle.7. And Beauty? A Dialogue.Part IV: Feminism and Aesthetic Practice:.8. Debating Feminisms.9. Women's Space: Echo, Caesura, Echo.Bibliography.