Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CINDY WEINSTEIN AND CHRISTOPHER LOOBY

PART 1  Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom

Liberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America

EDWARD CAHILL

The Writing on the Wall: Revolutionary Aesthetics and Interior Spaces   IVY G. WILSON

Stephen Crane’s Refrain   MAX CAVITCH

Lyric Citizenship in Post 9/11 Performance: Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state   JULIE ELLISON

PART 2  Aesthetics and the Representation of Sexuality

Aesthetics Beyond the Actual: The Marble Faun and Romantic Sociality   CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA

Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Figure in the Carpet   DORRI BEAM

Sexuality’s Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and the Autobiography of an Androgyne   CHRISTOPHER LOOBY

From Hawthorne to Hairspray: American Anxieties About Beauty   WENDY STEINER

PART 3  Aesthetics and the Reading of Form

When Is Now? Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality   CINDY WEINSTEIN

Reading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading   TRISH LOUGHRAN

What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Critical Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge   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   ELISA NEW

PART 4  Aesthetics and the Question of Theory

Warped Conjunctions: Jacques Rancière and African American Twoness   NANCY BENTLEY

Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century   DOROTHY J. HALE

Postwar Pastoral: The Art of Happiness in Philip Roth   MARY ESTEVE

Perfect Is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio; or, If Hooks Could Kill   ERIC LOTT

Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social   SIANNE NGAI

Afterword   CHARLES ALTIERI

Contributors

Index