American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions

Cindy Weinstein is professor of English at the California Institute of Technology and the author of The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. She is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe and coeditor, with Peter Stoneley, of A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950. Christopher Looby is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States and editor of The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. With Christopher Castiglia, he is the coeditor of a special issue of ESQ on "New Approaches to Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature" and wrote the introduction to Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself.

This indispensable book recuperates questions of beauty, form, sensuousness, and taste after they have been largely discarded by the politically engaged criticism of the last two to three decades. Understandably wary about a renewal of the aesthetic as the absolute horizon of interpretation, Weinstein and Looby-and their contributors-make a compelling case for reintegrating formalism and historicism. I can think of no other collection with similar richness and revisionary scope; its appearance marks a watershed in the study of American literature. -- Michael T. Gilmore, Brandeis University This collection, superbly edited and introduced, is a major contribution to current debates about literature, politics, and aesthetics and to our understanding of the relationship between the critical past and present. -- Samuel Otter, author of Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom Containing work by some of the finest contemporary U.S. literary scholars, and by marshalling their insights toward a common goal-recuperating the aesthetic-this volume provokes an energetic critical conversation. -- James Davis, Brooklyn College, City University of New York This is a book that deserves to be read by all who are, like its contributors, 'disenchanted with disenchantment' and looking to formulate whatever might come next... -- Jacob Brogan College Literature Ambitious... An invaluable read for students of American literature. -- Wilson Kaiser, Edward Waters College Journal of American Studies of Turkey

• Acknowledgments Introduction, by Cindy Weinstein and Christopher LoobyPart 1: Aesthetics and the Politics of FreedomLiberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America, by Edward Cahill The Writing on the Wall: Revolutionary Aesthetics and Interior Spaces Stephen Crane's Refrain, by Ivy G. Wilson Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata's the 51st (dream) state, by June EllisonPart 2: Aesthetics and the Representation of SexualityAesthetics Beyond the Actual: The Marble Faun and Romantic Sociability, Christopher Castiglia Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet, by Dorri Beam Sexuality's Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and the Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Christopher Looby From Hawthorne to Hairspray: American Anxieties About Beauty, by Wendy SteinerPart 3: Aesthetics and the Reading of FormWhen is Now? Poe's Aesthetics of Temporality, by Cindy Weinstein Reading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading, by Trish Loughran What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Critical Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge, by Jonathan Freedman with an addendum by Nan Zhang Da Upon a Peak in Beinecke: The Beauty of the Book in the Poetry of Susan Howe, by Elisa NewPart 4: Aesthetics and the Question of TheoryWarped Conjunctions: Jacques Ranciere and African American Twoness, by Nancy Bentley Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century, by Dorothy Hale Postwar Pastoral: The Art of Happiness in Philip Roth, by Mary Esteve Perfect Is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio; or, If Hooks Could Kill, by Eric Lott Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr's The Transformation and Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social, by Sianne NgaiAfterword Contributors Index