Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts)

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 2/24/2000
EAN 9780521454186, ISBN10: 0521454182

Hardcover, 282 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

This volume brings together 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.

List of illustrations
List of contributors
Editors' acknowledgements
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 theatre 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
Index.

"...this is in many ways an interesting and exciting volume." Johan Modé, Philosophy in Review