Aestheticism Now!

This year marks the twenty‐fifth anniversary of Isobel Armstrong's The Radical Aesthetic (2000), a powerful work of critical theory that aimed to “rethink the aesthetic” in the face of an antiaesthetic disposition that had come to dominate literary theory by the end of the 1990s. Erudite, witty, and experimental in form, The Radical Aesthetic received scant attention in American academia when it was published, yet Armstrong's brilliant polemic against the antiaesthetic anticipated many concerns and debates in literary studies over the years since its publication: an exhaustion with the hermeneutics of suspicion; a desire to take seriously beauty, pleasure, and aesthetic experience; and an investment in the poetics and politics of emotion. This issue convenes scholars from across literary studies to consider both how Armstrong's volume might remain a timely intervention into debates about beauty, value, affect, and gender, and how the two and a half decades of the so-called method wars and metacritical debate might look different with Armstrong's critical voice in the conversation.