The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Theory

For many years the study of aesthetics was regarded as a narrow and limited preoccupation, having only the slightest social and political relevance. With the advent of deconstruction, aesthetic considerations came to be seen not just as unfashionable but as deeply suspect and reprehensible. Within the growing realm of cultural studies, however, there is a strong and sustained revival of interest in questions of pleasure and value. The essays in this volume constitute a radical recovery and reappraisal of aesthetics and insist upon the continuing significance of aesthetic issues in modern culture. They address Marxist and feminist aesthetics, aesthetics and literary theory, modernism and postmodernism, pleasure and value.;As well as surveying the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, I.A. Richards, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man and others, these essays offer new and provocative interpretations of specific works of art. Among the writers whose works are discussed are William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, Craig Raine and Seamus Heaney. Together, these essays welcome the return of the aesthetic as a powerful and productive idea in contemporary cultural politics.