Abstract
In the current critical climate, many scholars are far more comfortable detailing their sexual histories in print than confessing to an interest in literary form.1 Indeed, in such circles the study of form is regarded as the irascible father who, unlike the obediently cheerful guests in the country house poems we will examine shortly, shows up uninvited at dinner parties at his children’s newly and proudly built post-structuralist house. After insisting that they replace Gehry’s dramatic entranceway of diagonal strips of sharp glass with some of those nice Corinthian columns, he attempts to dominate the dinner conversation with his unenlightening but unmistakably Enlightened pronouncements on Truth and Beauty despite—and more to the point because of—everyone else’s desire to talk about those subjects once unmentionable at dinner parties, sex, religion, and, of course, above all politics.
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Notes
Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” Genre 20 (1987): 241–257;
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 272–274.
See Levine’s “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 1–28.
On the problems of interpreting this concept, see, e.g., Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 113–117.
See, e.g., Robert Wicks, “Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): esp. 387–388.
See Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic Theory, esp. 31, 122–123; and two essays by Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 223–238; and “Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism,” British Journal of Aeshetics 38 (1998): 419–424.
Clive Bell, Art, 2nd ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), 21. Subsequent references to this book will appear in parentheses in my text.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno, Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6.
Yuriko Saito, “The Japanese Aesthetics of Imperfection and Insufficiency,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997): 377–385.
Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 240–241.
Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (1989): 721–771.
Certain philosophers argue that the beautiful is gendered female and the sublime male, a debate germane to but distinct from my argument. See, e.g., Paul Mattick, Jr., “Beautiful and Sublime: ‘Gender Totemism’ in the Constitution of Art,” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
On the relationship of gender and form, see also Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. 149–161, 170–173.
Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1.
Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 2.
J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1966), 12, 13.
Fredric Jameson famously demonstrates the first of those approaches in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), chap. 2. For the second approach, see, e.g., the reading of Lycidas in David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), esp. 282–285;
Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Susan J. Wolfson, ‘“Romantic Ideology’ and the Values of Aesthetic Form,” in Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology.
Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). The book also demonstrates Marxist approaches to genre.
See, e.g., Peter Rabinowitz, “‘Reader, I Blew Him Away’: Convention and Transgression in Sue Grafton,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 5.
Many students of speech and communication have also investigated the rhetoricity of genre and genres; see, e.g., Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–167.
On the erection of prodigy houses and the decline of hospitality, also see two important studies of the country house poem: G. R. Hibbard’s article, “The Country-House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956): 160–162;
William A. McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), esp. 18–35.
For an argument connecting Jonsons “To Sir Robert Wroth” to a different historical issue, the relationship of local communities to the court, see Martin Elsky, “Microhistory and Cultural Geography: Ben Jonsons ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ and the Absorption of Local Community in the Commonwealth,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 500–526.
These issues are discussed throughout two important recent studies: Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
and Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). I am grateful to these authors for making their work available to me prior to publication. For a more detailed discussion of the domestic threats I cite, see my book Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On theories of hospitality, see Ladislaus J. Bolchazy, Hospitality in Early Rome: Livys Concept of its Humanizing Force (Chicago: Ares, 1977);
Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem; or, The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 5.
James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 143–144;
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 27–34.
Hugh Jenkins, “From Common Wealth to Commonwealth: The Alchemy of ‘To Penshurst,’” Clio 25 (1995): 176–180. I am also indebted to Alexandra Block for useful suggestions about the female body in these poems.
I cite Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (New York: Vintage, 1988). For instances of the phrases in question, see pp. 172, 177, and 209. Further page references will appear in parentheses within my text.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, John Updike (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). On the relationship between the progress novel and midlife decline novels, see xx.
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© 2002 Mark David Rasmussen
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Dubrow, H. (2002). The Politics of Aesthetics. In: Rasmussen, M.D. (eds) Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07177-4_4
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