Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination. Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.

The current test for copyright infringement requires a court or jury to assess whether the parties’ works are “substantially similar” from the vantage point of the “ordinary observer.” Embedded within this test are several assumptions about audiences and art that neuroaesthetics—the study of the neural processes underlying aesthetic behavior—calls into question. To illustrate the disconnect between the law’s understanding of aesthetic appreciation and the reality of our reactions to works of art, the chapter explores a recent high-profile copyright matter involving the rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven.” Under current law, no effort is made to select jurors with the same listening or viewing tastes as the target audience for the original work—in this case, fans of classic rock. Nor can expert witnesses aid the jury’s understanding of that target audience. Instead, the assumption seems to be that we all appreciate works in the same indescribable way and one person’s reaction is as good as another. In truth, the basic biology of aesthetic reaction changes markedly depending on familiarity, experience, and even gender, contradicting copyright law’s one size-fits-all-approach.

This essay proposes that politics, diplomacy, and a desire for peace were defining markers of Indigenous cultural and literary engagements. European settlers arriving on this continent with an eye toward possessing it wrote off Native peoples as savage and unqualified stakeholders in the “New World” they were forging. The colonial archive, however, almost in spite of itself, turns up repeated instances of Indigenous overtures of peace, presented in traditional frameworks, which can be effectively traced in recognizable patterns from the earliest recorded encounters through to the first major indigenous literary productions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A mindful reading of this archive yields aspects of tradition that inform the outlines of an indigenous literary aesthetic. When indigenous authors such as Samson Occom and William Apess began appearing in print, they carried forward these traditions, confounding settler notions of what it means to be a “politick salvage.”

In The Winter’s Tale, power, eros, death, the utopian, and the aesthetic are the main themes in play. It begins in a world of amoral and dehumanizing power politics and ends in affirmations of the utopian spirit – while acknowledging the realities of death and suffering. It draws on festival traditions, fairy tales, and ancient issues of resurrection and rebirth in its end and political and psychological issues, as King Leontes becomes a mad tyrant. His madness paradoxically takes an aesthetic form in its (perverse) creativity and reliance on intuitive mental decisions as defined by Kant – thus relating to the aesthetic issues later in the play. The play’s utopian space is a mixed, complicated locus that includes both the utopian and the nonutopian. What makes it a consummate example of Shakespearean metatheater is its investigation of the relations of two concepts of ancient provenance, “art” and “nature,” introduced off-handedly, played with extensively in the second half of the play, and climaxed and thematically resolved in the complex, dissonant unity of the two terms figured when an apparent stone statue of the supposedly dead Queen Hermione is revealed as living flesh.

Chapter 6 shows The Tempest dispersing instances of the aesthetic-utopian and instrumental political power throughout until a remarkable ending imposes a tragicomic aesthetic over all other materials in the play. In describing the disenchanted early modern world with fantasies of enchantment, in representing instrumental reason as magical manipulation of natural spirits, and in manifesting the power of aesthetic representations to heal, restore, and regenerate a fallen humanity, the play is one of Shakespeare’s consummate examples of the aesthetic-utopian. At the center of the play is the master–slave pair Prospero and Caliban. Each is a deposed sovereign in a narrative of betrayal, forming the center of two (fragmentary) dramas that are each an essential part of the larger play. And in the play’s implied after-time, both are restored to their former polities as sovereigns. And both see something of the foolishness of the political struggles in which they had lived so long. As such, they are important parts of the aesthetic-utopian in the play’s conclusion, which does not so much defeat the political as declare it irrelevant to the play’s ultimate aesthetic-utopian vision.

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1

The first chapter argues that stylistic virtue was an important concept in British aesthetics that significantly influenced the development of formalism. It begins by examining the prevalence of stylistic virtues in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century rhetoric, where they were shaped by two approaches that mirror those described in the introduction: a psychological one that viewed style as extrinsic to textual content, and a belletristic one that emphasized the stylistic construction of aesthetic “character.” As the division between rhetoric and literary criticism began to harden, a new generation of Victorian critics co-opted the belletristic approach, placing the analysis of style at the heart of the emerging discipline of “English.” While some scholars have argued that Victorian readers were insensitive to style, this chapter reveals that wide-ranging figures such as Thomas De Quincey, Alexander Bain, David Masson, and Herbert Spencer each centered the aesthetic distinctiveness of literature around small-scale stylistic properties.

While Gothic scholars of the last two or three decades have explored forms of Gothic sensation, spectacle or visuality, they have generally had as their focus illustrations, caricature prints, graphic ephemera and advertising material rather than oil paintings and watercolours by the famous artists associated with Romanticism. This chapter considers precisely those works of art that have defined Romanticism. The more circumscribed notion of art and the artist associated with the ‘autonomisation’ of art around 1800 is here tied to the emergence of Gothic forms and themes within painting. It is argued that it is more than coincidental that the chronology of the original phase of Gothic literary and cultural production matches that of the development of aesthetics as philosophical discourse, and the ‘invention of art’ as a relatively autonomous field of activity. That a full-blooded Gothic art subsequently resurfaces only intermittently in the history of ‘high art’ exposes not only the volatility and inconstancy of Gothic culture, or the irreconcilability of the Gothic and art, but also the general ambivalence towards the indeterminacies of art in the modern era.

This chapter highlights New York’s singular capacity to inspire dialogue across disciplines, a practice that emerges in recent ekphrastic novels set in the post-millennial period that investigate how aesthetic experience shapes subjective reflections on time, economics, and loss. This turn towards narrativizing aesthetic experience, and how formal encounters with art may prompt critical self-inquiry, reflects these authors’ commitment to cultivate values like emotional responsiveness, perceptual acuity, and even interpersonal solidarity. This ethos, bred by a heightened aesthetic awareness, comes in response to what these authors recognize to be an erosion of creative and emotional vitality caused in part by the pervasive marketability of art in late capitalism, otherwise known as image culture.