Introduction: A Case for Rethinking the Category of the Aesthetic.

Part I: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the 'Problem' of the Aesthetic:.

1. Cultural Materialism and Culturalism.

2. The Aesthetic and the Polis: Marxist Deconstruction.

3. Writing from the Broken Middle - Post Structuralist Deconstruction.

Part II: The Poetics of Emotion:.

4. Textual Harassment: the ideology of close reading, or how close is close?.

5. Thinking Affect.

Part III: Cultural Capital, Value and a Democratic Aesthetics:.

6. Beyond the Pricing Principle.

7. And Beauty? A Dialogue.

Part IV: Feminism and Aesthetic Practice:.

8. Debating Feminisms.

9. Women's Space: Echo, Caesura, Echo.

Bibliography.

Isobel Armstrong is professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely on Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, nineteenth-century poetry, poetics, politics, theories of language and contemporary literary theory. She is co-editor of Women: A Cultural Review. Her most recent books include Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) and the Oxford Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (1996), edited with Joe Bristow.

I. Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London