Description
Book SynopsisArt’s Undoing is about radical aestheticism, the term that best describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature.
Trade Review“Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism proposes a stunning
alternative to our habit of thinking of the work of art as an occasion for
heightened vision or temporary respite. Like the mind-blowing opening lines of
many of Dickinson’s poems, Pyle’s radical aestheticism undoes the apotropaic
function usually assigned to art and understands poetry not as a domain
offering and requiring protection from encroaching forces but as a darkness making event and as the ‘unwilled’ imposition of a sensuous apprehension. In this brilliant, beautifully written work of literary criticism that promises to leave its own readers exquisitely undone, Forest Pyle unthreads Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde into figures, reflections, traces, and lines that, unlike the Medusa’s face, will never resolve themselves into a single, readable, and hence pierce-able image.”
---—Anne-Lise Francois, University of California, BerkeleyA range of theoretical projects are considered in a survey recommended for any advanced literary analysis and philosophy holding. * —California Bookwatch *
“This is one of the most powerful and subtle books I’ve read on nineteenth-century literature in decades. It’s searching, meticulous, and wide-ranging as it pursues its novel, overarching thesis. Pyle brings into striking relief what is powerful and problematic in an important strain of nineteenth-century literature, setting its poetry in motion all over again.”
---—Ian Balfour, York UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: "From Which One Turns Away Aestheticism and Its Radicality, The Insistence of the Aesthetic, "Our Romantic Movement," Scene of Shipwreck 1. "A Light More Dread Than Obscurity": Spelling and Kindling in Percy Bysshe Shelley "Frail Spells," "Wholly Political," Kindling and Ash, "A Shape All Light" 2. "I Hold It Towards You": Keats's Weakness "Consumed in the Fire," Weakness, Threats, "On He Flared" 3. What the Zeros Taught: Emily Dickinson, Event-Machine "The Plunge from the Front," "A Word Dropped": The Dickinsonian Event-Machine, "A System of Aesthetics," "Bright Impossibility" 4. Hopkins's Sighs "Let Him Oh! With His Air of Angels Then Lift Me, Lay Me!" Hopkins's Breathturns, "The Fire of Stress," "The Fire That Breaks," 5. Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti On the Surface... , "One Face Looks Out," "A Blunder of Taste"; or, What Would Clement Greenberg Say? "Love Is Addressed to the Semblance"; or, What Would Jacques Lacan Say? The Promises of Glass, 6. "Rings, Pearls, and All": Wilde's Extravagance The Soul of Man Under Aestheticism, Christ the Romantic, Christ the Dandy, The Cost of a Kiss, Covered with Jewels Notes Index
